


To Be Restored

by serenityfails



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Agender Castiel (Supernatural), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Castiel in a Female Vessel (Supernatural), Cissexism, Co-Parenting the Antichrist, Coming Out, Cunnilingus, Fake Marriage, Hand Jobs, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, Magical Gender Confirmation, Minor Rowena MacLeod/Sam Winchester, Nightmares, Other, Past Relationship(s), Post-Episode: s13e05 Advanced Thanatology, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:15:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 47,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28794525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/pseuds/serenityfails
Summary: He's about to ask who the hell she is, what the hell she thinks she's playing at— but then she squints, like she's trying to look past Dean's eyes to see right into him, and her head cocks birdlike, just so, and it tugs at something under his ribs, blooming into an ache that feels as good as it hurts, because somehow, it's him. It's Cas.The Empty sends Castiel back different.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Rowena MacLeod & Sam Winchester
Comments: 232
Kudos: 477





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ME, NOV 27 2020: wouldn't it be funny if I watched Supernatural for the first time now, as an ironic joke  
> ME, DEC 27 2020: I finished the entirety of Supernatural in one month  
> ME, DEC 28 2020: I've got an idea for an AU where the Empty spits out Cas in his female vessel from s12e10  
> ME, JAN 16 2021: I'VE GOT 18.8 WORDS OF FIC AND THERE'S NO SIGN OF STOPPING SEND HELP
> 
> Anyway, I'm a joke. Please enjoy my screaming. Title stolen from "Hebrews 11:40" by The Mountain Goats. Eternally, thanks to [electricshoebox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricshoebox/pseuds/electricshoebox) for being my editor and cheerleader.
> 
>  _ADDITIONAL WARNINGS:_ The language used regarding gender in this story is gonna be all over the place because everyone involved is coming at it with a different level of understanding. Because it's from Dean's point of view, it cycles through different pronouns for Castiel based on Dean's perception. If a clumsy handling/understanding of gender, inconsistent gendering, and Dean's general issues with his sexuality are going to be hard for you to read, please do so with caution! Thanks for understanding.
> 
> Tag list will be updated as chapters go up, and the rating is subject to change.

"Hello, Dean."

The voice on the phone isn't one that Dean recognizes, except for the part where there's only one person it could be. But that doesn't make sense either. It's impossible.

Dean drives, and feels like his soul is somewhere else, hovering just outside of where his knuckles whiten against the steering wheel, outside of the rigid tension in his back and the gnawing feeling in his stomach. He's got a death hangover in a very literal sense and this isn't helping any. Nothing about their lives has ever obeyed any kind of logic, but this… this requires a hope Dean hasn't been able to feel since he watched his mother disappear, since he wrapped his closest friend in stolen bedsheets and watched him slowly burn to ash. Nothing in Dean's life that leaves ever comes back right, and never without a price.

He's afraid to ask what the price of this might be.

Next to him, Sam is similarly quiet, and he can tell he's thinking the same things Dean's trying not to. Dean turned off the music to answer his phone and never turned it back on, and the silence sits heavily between them. Sam clears his throat, and the suddenness of it almost startles him.

"You're sure it was Cas?"

"I… I don't know. It sounded like him."

"But you said it _didn't_ sound like him."

"Well, no, not like… not like he usually sounds, but other than that," Dean says, feeling a little foolish about it. He doesn't know how he knows, he just… _does_. Except for how he keeps doubting himself.

"What if it's a trap, or—"

"I mean, knowing our luck, it probably is," Dean grumbles, "but Christ, Sammy, we have to find out. It's _Cas_."

"Right," Sam says, relenting. "You're right, of course."

He doesn't speak for the next twenty miles, the quiet only breaking again so he can gently direct Dean down the side roads the voice on Dean's phone claimed would take them to where Castiel theoretically waits for them.

They find the spot in the early hours of the morning— a payphone and a woman dressed like she belongs on the damn Titanic, waving a little handkerchief off the starboard bow or whatever, one relic of a bygone era next to another. Sam and Dean share a look, a wordless acknowledgement to be on their guard as they step out of the car.

She's very still, brown hair piled on her head under a green velvet hat, her long beige skirt settled around her feet. He's about to ask who the hell she is, what the hell she thinks she's playing at— but then she squints, like she's trying to look past Dean's eyes to see right into him, and her head cocks birdlike, just so, and it tugs at something under his ribs, blooming into an ache that feels as good as it hurts, because somehow, it's him. It's Cas.

"Cas, is that really you?" Dean feels like his heartbeat is roaring in his ears. He can hardly focus on anything else but trying to find the evidence that it's really his friend in this unfamiliar body. Sam looks at him like he's nuts, and maybe he is, but he can't explain why he knows what he knows. The woman nods wordlessly, as though she can't explain it herself.

"What're you— That's not Cas, Dean, it's… who _are_ you?" Sam has a hand at his side, ready to grab whatever knife he's got stashed the second this encounter goes south.

"It's me," the woman says, the same voice Dean heard over the phone. Her register is much higher than the Castiel he knows, but there's something to the quality of it, to her cadence, that recalls his manner of speaking. "This body is… a vessel I took briefly, a hundred years ago. I'm not sure why this is the form I woke up in… I thought perhaps _you'd_ done something."

"Done what?" Sam keeps his voice low, but his frank disbelief is evident. "Cas is dead. We burned him. He shouldn't be able to…"

"Maybe that's why," Dean says, eagerly seizing on any explanation. "Because we burned his body, so he needed… I mean he had to get one _somewhere_."

"Frances Krawczyk died of Spanish Influenza in 1918 and was buried in a mass grave in New York. It doesn't track, given where I… woke up. All I know is that I _was_ dead," says the woman, and it raises the hair on Dean's arms. "But then I... annoyed an ancient cosmic being so much that he sent me back."

"I don't even know what to say." Sam looks agitated, and Dean can tell he isn't quite buying it. He doesn't know why he is. Maybe because the day before he'd woken up to his seventh straight morning with a hangover and decided he didn't care if he ever woke up again, and the promise that he might get Cas back after all makes him think there's a reason to wake up tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

"I do," Dean says, and tugs the woman—Cas, he tells himself, this chick in her funny little hat and her theater geek getup is _Castiel_ , the best friend he's ever had—into a tight hug. "Welcome home, pal."

Castiel's head tucks up against Dean's neck easily, and it doesn't even jostle her hat, which seems to be pinned to her hair. Dean's a little bit startled to find she's taller than he's used to— almost as tall as Dean is. Taller, with the hat. Her arms close around his back, just as stiff and awkward as Cas ever was, though he's— she's—Dean's got a headache—Castiel has gotten better at them, the longer he's spent occupying a physical form. Cas hugs like he's still not sure he's allowed to, most of the time. But now, Dean hears a little sigh, feels the puff of warm breath against his shoulder, and the body in his arms relaxes an inch, and it feels good. So damn good. He breaks it off before he makes it weird. Or weirder. Sam trusts Dean enough to follow his lead, or maybe he just loves group hugs too much to pass one up, though he still looks bewildered.

"How long was I gone?" New-Model-Cas asks, once Sam's released her.

Dean hates the way he can feel his voice breaking when he answers, "Too damn long." If he's not careful, he's gonna do something he regrets, like _cry_. He's just tired, he tells himself, tired and trying to process too much at once. He's been awake for like, twenty-two hours. He's gone a day or more without proper sleep plenty of times, but he died yesterday, so he figures he's got an excuse to be a little off his game.

The original plan was to keep pushing until they got to Lebanon, but that's not happening now. It's another fifteen minutes to get to the edge of town where they might be able to find a flophouse that rents to folks like them at 3 AM. Dean steals glances at Cas in the rearview the whole way, cheeks heating when her eyes catch his in the reflection. They're blue, he notices, just as blue as before, and he turns back to the road, his grip tightening on the wheel.

"Last time I had a girl with a skirt that long in the backseat, we were just coming off a salt and burn in Mennonite country," Dean jokes, hoping it'll pierce the tension.

"Oh my god, Dean," Sam groans. In the mirror, Castiel's eyes narrow.

"Don't judge me," Dean says, digging his grave further. "Besides, I'm pretty sure every member of our immediate family has christened the backseat of this car. It's like a Winchester rite of passage."

"No, shut up. I'm taking away your talking privileges," Sam says. "You're only allowed grunts and gestures now. Shouldn't be too much of a stretch for you."

"You see the—" Dean starts to say, but Sam interrupts him, _ah-ah_ ing him into silence. Dean starts and is stopped three more times before he seals his hand over Sam's mouth and shoves him to the side. "You see the kind of treatment I get from my own brother?" Sam slaps his hand away, grousing at him like a brat. Dean looks in the mirror to catch Castiel's attention again, only to find her beaming softly at him. They're pulling into the parking lot of a by-the-hour motel, and the guttering floodlight at the main office catches her eyes, dancing.

"I missed the two of you," she says. "Very much."

Dean's throat closes, and he stares at his hands while Sam twists around in his seat to tell Castiel that they missed her, too.

The room available to them is predictably disgusting and only has one sagging queen in it, but he and Sam have shared before, and Castiel doesn't need sleep, so it's fine. It's dark as hell out, so hopefully no one's around to see two grubby men and a woman in a halloween costume walk into a by-the-hour motel together.

"Sorry, Cas," Dean says, tugging off his boots and leaving them in the middle of the floor. Sam's not much better. He caught some z's during the car ride, but not enough. "Just a few hours of you watching us sleep like a creeper and we'll be back home."

"It's okay, Dean," Castiel says, and it's still just… so weird to hear Castiel's words in some stranger's voice. It's the way she says his name, he thinks, that just sounds so familiar it hurts. He just needs time to adjust to this, and it'll be fine, he's sure. Just as long as Cas is safe with them.

"There's a few new episodes of _The Life and Times of Martin Luther_ ," Sam says, and he tosses his old iPod to Cas, who catches it one-handed and regards it like it's something worth getting excited about. "They've released like, three or four since… Well." Dean's already half-asleep, slumping face-down on top of the covers, still wearing his clothes. Couple of fucking nerds.

"Thank you," Dean hears Cas say, and then he doesn't hear anything at all until Sam's snoring wakes him four hours later. Dean flexes his hands, runs his tongue over his teeth, blinks the gunk out of his eyes to find that Castiel is indeed watching him sleep. He's gotten used to that, too, more or less, but he's not used to the new face, and for a second he wonders if he drank too much and took home a historical reenactor from a haunted house job or something, before his brain catches up to his eyes and a blush creeps up his neck.

"We're gonna have to get you some different clothes," he mumbles, rolling up and out of bed. Sam stirs behind him, limbs creaking when he stretches awake.

"Ah," Cas says eloquently. She's sitting in a battered chair that looks like it might collapse under her at any moment, her hands resting in her lap, her skirt arranged tidily around her legs. Sam's iPod has been wrapped up in its own headphone cord, next to her hat. "Yes. I suppose I would… stick out."

"You can borrow something for now, if you want. I don't… I never really got how clothes worked for you guys."

Dean tugs his travel bag onto the bed and fishes out his spare pair of jeans and a blue flannel that he deems acceptable after a sniff test. Across from him, Sam makes a strangled noise and turns around rapidly.

"What?" Dean says, but when he turns to hand the clothes to Cas, he gets it, because she's undressed all the way down to some gauzy white something or other that would look like an old lady's bathing suit if it were made of something a little more substantial. "Oh, wow, okay, you're just going for it then, huh." Sam's being a drama queen, because it's not like Castiel's _naked_ or anything; underwear from way back when sure leaves a lot to the imagination. He tosses his clothes to Cas, and she unfurls the folded jeans, studying them with narrowed eyes.

"I have no idea if those are gonna fit right, but we can stop and pick up something else on the way home," Dean says. "You'll draw less attention in 'em at least."

Cas has turned her attention to herself, staring down at her own hips. She frowns, shaking her head, then it's Dean's turn to startle and whirl around to preserve Castiel's dignity, because she yanks on a few laces and slips that little white number she's wearing right off her shoulders. He'd seen Castiel with his shirt off in the past, but this is— Cas looks—

"You don't have to turn around," Castiel says, and Dean can hear the rustling as she steps into his jeans. What is she wearing under them if not— no, no, he can't think about that, that way madness lies. He's already going to have to live the rest of his admittedly probably not very long life knowing what Cas looks like with breasts. "I'm not embarrassed by nudity."

"Yeah, Cas? Well, we are," Dean says, his voice strained. Sam clears his throat, his shoulders hunched. Apparently that's the best argument he can muster to back Dean up.

"There's nothing inherently shameful about the human female form," Cas continues, and oh my god, Dean wishes she would stop talking. "In many of your cultures it's very common to—"

"Okay, well, in _this_ culture we wear shirts, and we give our friends a heads up before we go full Mardi Gras." Dean turns back around to find that Cas is buttoning up Dean's shirt and looking at him with that particular set to her mouth that usually means Dean's being fucked with. He regrets ever teaching Cas what a sense of humor is.

"If it comforts you, I don't need a string of beads in exchange for the view."

Before Dean can stop himself, he's giving her a once-over. It was hard to tell the actual shape of Castiel's body under all the layers, but he can see now that she's kind of long and narrow, and his jeans fit well enough over her hips, though they bunch up around her feet and sag at the waist. The flannel is big on her, and she unbuttons the sleeves to fold them up around her elbows. It's— it's uncomfortably hot, is what it is, recalling any number of women who've stolen Dean's shirts after they spent the night together. Dean is convinced women absolutely _know_ how hot that is, but he doesn't think for a second Castiel does. For all that they're joking about her tits right now, there's no way Cas could know that his own baggy, shapeless clothes on a beautiful woman—yeah, Dean can admit that Cas is beautiful, it's just an objective fact and it doesn't mean anything, thank you very much, though she's only kind of a woman—his clothes on a beautiful, kinda-sorta woman _really_ does it for him.

Cas tugs the pins from her hair, which tumbles down—her hair does things like _tumble_ now— and rests in messy waves against her shoulders, giving her a bit of a bed-rumpled look. 

They have to get Cas her own clothes, _now_ , before he thinks anything else he can't un-think.

Dean and Sam eat a gas station burrito and a gas station granola cup, respectively, and wait while Castiel selects a new uniform, which turns out to be pretty close to her old standard: sensible slacks and a blazer, sensible shoes, a white button-up, presumably some underwear more suited to this century, and a beige coat to complete the ensemble. For all that she's Heaven's little rebel, Cas really is a creature of habit. She comes out of the store with an overfull bag, still wearing Dean's overlarge shirt, apparently perfectly content to head all the way home before giving Dean his damn pants back.

"That's it?" Dean pulls a face as Cas shows them what she picked out. "New body, new you! Don't you wanna mix it up a little?"

Castiel frowns down at the pile of clothes in her arms. "There's nothing wrong with the way I dress."

"Nah, there's nothing _wrong_ with it, if you like H&R Block chic. I'm just saying, if I was reborn as a hot chick I'd want to show off a little."

The matching looks Sam and Cas give him make his cheeks burn.

 _"What?"_ Dean tosses his hands indignantly. "You're telling me if you were a woman you wouldn't want to look hot?"

"I can honestly say I haven't give it much thought, Dean," Sam says, looking like he's about to ask Dean if there's anything else he wants to admit to, and Dean doesn't want to give him the satisfaction, so he climbs inside the car and turns the music up before Sam can open his pinched little mouth again.

Castiel's new wardrobe is paid for with the help of Charlie's skeleton key, the hacked charge card she'd set up for them a few years back, which hasn't failed them yet. Dean thinks about her every time he gets groceries, now. Usually that means he ends up throwing a little bottle of something top shelf into the bag along with their supplies and drinking half of it in her honor, praying she's somewhere in Heaven reliving the time she scored with Aeon Flux at SDCC or something.

On the drive home, Castiel asks about Jack, about what happened while she was gone. They give her the cliffnotes version, about how Jack had emerged almost fully grown, how angels and demons alike seek his power. Sam tells her of the difficulties Jack has had mastering them. He tactfully leaves out the parts where Dean straight up threatened the kid.

"He helped us hold a funeral," Sam says. "For you and Kelly."

Castiel breathes out shakily, her voice strained. "I wish his first day on Earth hadn't been so… so violent. So full of loss. It must have been so difficult for him."

"He, um. He also told me he chose you as his father."

Dean steals a look back to find Castiel's eyes shining. She looks… she looks heartbroken and terribly proud all at once. Dean feels guilt squeezing the breath from his lungs. He had originally thought of Castiel as a victim of brainwashing, courtesy of the antichrist. With everything that's happened since then, he's been forced to wonder if Jack really isn't actually just a lost kid with good intentions and too much strength to get a handle on. Castiel really _believes_ in him, for reasons Dean will never really be able to understand. Maybe he owes it to both of them to try a little harder.

In exchange, Castiel tells them of the Empty, the void where beings like her find their final rest. It sounds kind of like how Dean had pictured death, honestly, before he knew that Heaven and Hell and everything that went along with them were real. There are worse things than sleeping quietly forever, Dean thinks. A day or two ago he would have welcomed it. But Castiel had not slept peacefully, had heard a voice call out her name in the darkness and, in defiance of a millennia of dead silence, woke up.

"I wonder if it may have been Jack. If his voice had the power to call me home," Castiel says. Dean tries not to remember a choked-out prayer behind a restaurant or split knuckles on a wooden sign, how he'd begged and pleaded and wept for Cas to return. The scabs have long healed over, but his hands flex against the steering wheel remembering the ache.

Jack is engrossed in something he's pulled up on the laptop when they arrive back at the bunker, and Dean wonders with a flare of anxiety if they should be setting up, like, parental controls or something on it. At the very least, he now knows how to clear his browser history (thanks again, Charlie). It takes him a minute to notice Castiel, but when he does, his face brightens in instant recognition, despite the fact that they've never officially "met" in person, as far as Dean can fathom it. Angel bullshit is still a little far out of his comprehension despite how much of it he'd had to field over the years. He's got questions, but he's not alone in that, and more than anything he just seems overwhelmingly happy.

"I'm surprised you knew it was him— uh, her?" Sam turns pink, floundering a little as Cas and Jack part from a tight embrace. Maybe the first Jack's ever had, Dean thinks guiltily.

"Of course I knew him," Jack says. Dean doesn't think he's ever seen the kid look this content. "He and I spoke before I was born."

"Oh," Sam says, like that makes any kind of sense. Fucking angels. "Sorry, I guess we didn't really, uh, ask how you want to be referred to, Cas."

"I don't have a preference," Castiel says, still too busy smiling at Jack, taking in the face he hasn't been able to see until now. "Gender has never had the same importance to angels that it does to humanity. If my appearance means it's easier for you to think of me as a woman, it makes no difference to me."

"Cas was a guy, now he's a chick," Dean says, wishing the conversation would end, because it's starting to make his head spin a little again. "Or she's a chick. Whatever, that happens all the time, right?"

"Broadly speaking, I was never 'a guy'," Castiel says, finally turning away from Jack, who takes in the conversation with all the placid attentiveness of a mathlete in Calculus. That answer rubs Dean the wrong way for a reason he can't really pin down, making him bristle.

"Yeah, but you were— I mean, you were in a guy suit, so for all intents and purposes—"

"Just because someone is assigned male doesn't mean they identify as a man," Sam says, sounding one thousand percent like he's quoting something.

"'Assigned male'?"

Sam blushes all the way to his ears. He looks like he knows he's about to say something Dean will never let go, which is absolutely true. "Yeah, like, when you're born. Or uh, reborn, I guess, in this case? I dunno, I took Women's Studies one semester."

 _"'Women's Studies'?"_ Sam rolls his eyes while Dean grins, shaking his head triumphantly. "I knew it, I _knew_ you only went to that school for the pussy."

"Dean—!" Sam gapes like he swallowed a frog, and that only makes Dean laugh harder. "It wasn't— Don't say that shit in front of—" Sam hisses, and then tries to reel back his reaction, trying as he's done a hundred times before not to let Dean get a rise out of him. He is blessedly unsuccessful. "That's exactly the kind of thing you don't want to say in a Women's Studies class."

"Got it. I'll just clear out before you guys bust out the hand mirrors to study your vaginas or whatever."

Sam practically shoves Dean out of the room, apologizing to Castiel and Jack as he goes. Dean thinks they're just horsing around like they've done a million times before until Sam stops in the hallway, looking at Dean like he's seriously about to lay into him.

"Woah, okay, Sammy, sorry I said anything about your little girls only bookclub—"

"Dean, shut up for like, a second. Please?" Dean shuts up, but that doesn't mean he has to be happy about it. Sam hunches down to speak to him in a hushed but fervent tone, one hand on his shoulder and the other splayed in an attempt at a calming gesture. "Look, can you just… can you please be cool about this?"

"'This'? You mean Cas? At what point did I indicate that I wasn't cool about this? I think I'm taking it pretty damn well, all things considered."

"Okay, you say that, but then you're also making all these shitty jokes about it! Cas just got back, we shouldn't be making him—uh—making him uncomfortable with, you know, how he looks. What— who he is. Whatever. And—" Sam makes a frustrated sound and lowered his voice even further. "I know you don't like Jack..."

Dean can feel the humor draining out of him with every second that this conversation refuses to end, but that really does it. "I don't like Jack?"

"You told me you were going to kill him, Dean," Sam hisses.

"Okay. And that was then, and we've had some time to get used to each other. What does Jack even have to do with any of this?"

"Jack is a kid. A weird, literally brand spanking new kid, who's still learning about the world, and we're the ones who have to, you know, look after him and teach him, and—"

"You're saying I'm a bad example," Dean says, and knows he's correctly intuited the direction this conversation is going when Sam makes that little tight-mouthed face he makes. "For Lucifer's son?"

"Yes, Dean, I don't want you to be a weird dick about… about this kind of thing in front of the mega-powerful half-angel teen-baby, okay? Please don't take this the wrong way," Sam says, in a tone of voice that clearly indicates he thinks Dean has already taken it the wrong way. "I know you're not like… I mean, I know this is just… Dad's shit."

Dean's fingers flex, then make a fist. "What shit is that exactly?"

"You know exactly what shit. The shit that made you call me Samantha all the time. The shit that made you say you hate glam rock and pretend you haven't seen every episode of that Dr. Sexy show." Sam sighs, and Dean can picture his pitying expression even though he absolutely cannot look him in the eye right now. "You say all that stuff cause you think you have to, but you don't _mean_ it. Like... I know how much you loved Charlie."

"Don't," Dean says, his voice catching. "Do not bring her up."

"Why not, Dean? I'm trying to say I know you're not some intolerant—"

"No, _don't._ I don't need to hear anything else."

"—Dean, would you please just— I'm trying to—" 

"End of conversation, Sammy!" Dean shouts, and Sam recoils an inch, his mouth clicking shut. "Jesus fucking Christ." Dean turns, marching toward his room, yanking the door open, and tossing his bag inside before continuing down the hall. "I'm taking a shower."

"Dean, come on…"

"I'm taking a shower," Dean says, "so I don't _set a bad example_ by telling you to _fuck off_ where the kid can hear."

Of course, once he's in the shower, seething and cursing while he shuts his eyes against the spray, there's nothing standing between Dean and his thoughts, which ramp into overdrive and veer right off a cliff before he can stop them, starting at _fuck Sam, fuck him for bringing up Charlie, fuck him for acting like he has any idea what he's talking about, fuck him for talking about Dad like it's his fault he was raised a certain way_ , and devolving until it loops back around, and Dean's calling himself a pig and an asshole and a dumb fucking moron.

Sam's always been the one who knows how to relate to people at their lowest. Mr. Sensitive who doesn't drink too much and make an ass out of himself at bars, who crying girls relax around like he's the physical embodiment of a tub of Chubby Hubby, who takes Women's Studies and eats salads and listens to podcasts about Martin Luther's theses. And it'd be one thing if he were anywhere else but here in the shit with Dean, if he'd gone off to Stanford like he planned and became a bigshot lawyer, working pro bono to defend the rights of innocent puppies or something, but he's not. He's still just Dean's goofy baby brother, too earnest and open-minded, always ready to believe in something Dean never would've thought up on his own.

Dean keeps going over it in his head. If he's setting a bad example now, the example he set for Sam growing up was a million times worse. But somehow, that kid turned out all right. How was it that Sam could have clashed with their dad as much as he did, been as sensitive and bookish and gentle as he was when they were being trained to fight a war that would never end, while Dean was the one Dad was always disappointed in? He tried so hard to be what it seemed like John Winchester wanted him to be, and what had that ever gotten him?

He's been thinking about their dad a lot, these days, about how much Dean hears his voice coming out of his mouth when he talks. Ten years ago he might have said that was a good thing. Now there's Jack, looking at him like Sam used to look at him when they were little, like he was looking for Dean's approval, or his guidance, and he can feel his dad's lessons taking over again: _Kill monsters. Protect Sammy. Avenge Mary. Nothing's more important than family._ What would Dad think if he knew about Jack? Hell, what would he think about Cas?

Something ugly and cruel in him whispers, _What about Benny?_

Dean slaps himself once sharply, scrubs the last of the soap out of his hair like he can wash his thoughts down the drain along with it. Dad's gone, he tells himself, and wherever he is, it doesn't matter what the hell he thinks anymore.

Toweled off and wrapped in his dead guy robe, Dean balls up his dirty clothes, hauling them back to his room so he can get some laundry together. He stops short in the hall when he sees that Castiel is in his doorway, standing statue-still. She's changed into her new clothes, and the effect is a little eerie, like someone just took the old Cas and hit the make-me-a-lady button on him. Dean clears his throat.

"Something you need?"

She startles a little, stepping back and turning to him with her chin tucked down guiltily. "I'm sorry… I wanted to return your clothes." Now that she's turned toward him, Dean can see his jeans and flannel folded neatly in her arms.

"Took a shower," Dean says, and points at his wet hair to emphasize. Castiel nods, then finally seems to catch on that she needs to step aside to let Dean into his own room. Of course, rather than step back, she just invites herself inside, hovering near Dean's desk while he takes his clothes back and empties his travel bag so he can refill it with dirty laundry. "Anything else?"

Castiel doesn't answer right away, so Dean looks back up to figure out what's got her so preoccupied. She's got her finger on the lip of an empty bottle, one of many littering the surfaces in Dean's room. Looking around now, it paints a pretty damning picture. The trash bin is overflowing, there's a row lined up over the headboard, a few on the dresser, and even more scattered on the floor by his bed.

"It was a bad couple of months," Dean says by way of explanation, his jaw working as he tries not to let it show just how bad it really got. "It's fine."

"It's not fine, Dean," Cas says, and steps toward him, brow furrowed, reaching out as if she might touch him before she freezes, her arms hovering uselessly at her sides. Her eyes are focused on his with Castiel's typical intensity. It's uncanny, seeing all these familiar gestures play out in an entirely unfamiliar body.

"Can we just skip this part?" Dean sighs. Castiel's head tilts in question, the furrow between her brows deepening. When she does that, Dean just wants to poke her right between them until she relaxes. "The part where you follow me around looking like a kicked puppy for a few weeks until you apologize for dying in front of me and we go back to being—" Dean swallows. "You know, friends."

Cas does touch him then, gripping his shoulder. A droplet of water falls from his ear and onto the back of her hand.

"I am sorry, Dean. That I wasn't here for you. You and Sam, and Jack. The way things went at the end… I wish—"

"I told you to skip it," Dean says gruffly, patting her hand and pushing it away in the same gesture. "We're good."

" _You_ aren't though. Not really." Cas sighs in frustration, her eyes scanning the room again, like she can see the whole terrible scene playing out. The drinking, the nightmares, and the really bad days, when Dean went looking for jobs hoping for one that might turn out to be fatal. "I wish you would take better care of yourself."

"Yeah, well, that's a two way goddamn street, pal," Dean says. It comes out much harsher than he means it to, and Castiel flinches away from it, which is satisfying in the way that pressing on a bruise is.

"How did this turn into a fight?" Castiel asks. She looks more sad than angry.

"I don't know, isn't that usually how it goes with us?" Dean says, rubbing at his forehead, already feeling the anger drain out of him. He means it as a kind of tension-diffusing joke, but it just comes out tired, and Castiel isn't laughing. "Look, just, please don't worry about me. Things got pretty bad, but… you know, you're back now. Problem solved." Dean looks anywhere but at her, wishing he could just shut the door on this topic forever, but Cas just keeps staring at him. When she gets laser-focused like this, it's easy to remember she used to burn peoples' eyes out of their skulls pretty regularly.

"I know it's hard for you," Castiel says, "to talk about your feelings."

" _Enough_. Between you and Sam I've had enough feelings talk to last me a year. I'm done. I'm also hungry as shit. I'm gonna see if the ham in the fridge is still any good. You come along if you want, Lassie, but I'm not talking about anything more serious than the virtues of yellow mustard versus dijon." Dean storms out before she can give him an answer.

Dean proceeds to methodically construct a ham sandwich the size of his head in utter silence. Castiel does follow him into the kitchen after a moment, sitting at the little table and watching Dean putter away, like she honestly has nothing better to do. She watches him check the bread for mold and staleness, watches him take half the contents of the fridge out and clutter the countertops. Dean slathers one slice of bread with mayonnaise and two with mustard; lettuce, tomato, thin-sliced red onions, deli ham, and swiss cheese are stacked and pressed into two tiers. The sandwich is sliced diagonally into two triangles, a picture-perfect cross-section.

Castiel doesn't enjoy food like he did when he was human, but Dean has impressed upon him the importance of triangles when eating a sandwich in the past. Castiel had proceeded to talk about the mathematical beauty of triangles, which Dean supposed was Cas's way of appreciating Dean's culinary artistry. He's about to appreciate getting a good solid bite out of that cross-section when Jack wanders in.

"Hello!" He waves. It occurs to Dean that the kid is a little like Castiel's cartoon sidekick, when he's not being completely terrifying. Then again, Cas is pretty good at being terrifying too.

"Jack," Castiel says by way of greeting. Her smile isn't as easy as it was at their first meeting, and Dean tries not to feel like a dick about that too.

"Hey kid," Dean says, then pauses, looking down at his unplated lunch. "You hungry?"

So that's how Dean ends up making two high-stacked ham and swisses. He slides the first onto a plate and hands it to Jack, then makes a second for himself while Jack eats. And it's… it's actually nice. It's weird, but it's nice, to have Cas back, for Jack to have someone he can talk to that seems to be meeting him on the same level, who can relate to him in a way Dean can't. Jack chatters happily with Cas about the things he's learned since he was born, the things he and the Winchesters have done together, and he smiles, and eats the sandwich Dean made, and tells him it's a very good sandwich. Dean supposes there are worse ways to spend an afternoon.

And when Sam walks in, startled to see the three of them calmly eating lunch together, and Dean tells him he's welcome to join, but he can make his own damn sandwich, he has the good sense not to say another word on it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well I was going to wait to post this, but I just tested positive for COVID so I'm out of work for the next couple weeks. You know, how that happens. Guess I have nothing to do but rest and talk about ~Destiel~. Short but sweet chapter, I hope you enjoy it. Thank you to everyone who read and commented, it makes me so happy. <3
> 
> Extra special thanks to Z, who did absolutely gorgeous fanart of Cas rolling up the sleeves of Dean's flannel like, an hour after I posted, what the _hell_.
> 
>   
> 
> 
> Look at that. Amazing! I am filled with such enormously powerful gay energies now. [Please direct all praise to them over here.](https://destielamv.tumblr.com/post/640519502380072960/to-be-restored-serenityfails-supernatural)
> 
> * * *

Now that Castiel is living with the three of them, the pressure is off Sam when it comes to Jack's grace education, though Sam's taken it upon himself to teach him about human things, too. The two of them are learning ASL together, which is actually a little terrifying to watch; Jack picks everything up with an ease that is literally supernatural while Sam's still mixing up the letters A and S. Whenever Dean walks in on them practicing, he can feel Sam daring him to ask about it, but he never does. After all, Dean made Sam promise never to speak of Lisa or Ben again, and he kept that promise. Dean understands when to let something rest.

He and Sam have been teaching Jack the fundamentals of hunting together, too, but there is one thing Dean feels solely responsible for, and that's Jack's cultural education. That's how Cas, Jack, Sam, and Dean all end up piled in the TV room, popcorn ready, watching _A New Hope_.

"Metatron," Castiel says, and the name comes out like a curse, "placed the knowledge of this series of films in my head, but I've never actually _seen_ them."

"How did I forget to make you watch _Star Wars?"_ Dean says in disgust.

"Oh, I think I know this one," Jack says. "Like _Clone Wars!_ But that one didn't have real people in it. Is Ahsoka a real person in this?"

"The hell's an Ahsoka?" Dean scoffs, and sips his beer. "Wait, shh, you gotta read the opening scrawl."

Sam is a wet blanket who spends the movie flipping through some dusty old book, but Dean still feels proud of his choice, because it's clearly a hit with Jack, who is following all the emotional highs and lows of young Luke Skywalker with rapt attentiveness. On his other side, Castiel is leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, watching quietly, but she keeps getting distracted and blowing her hair out of her face. A few errant locks keep falling into her eyes, and the more she shoves them out of the way, the more her hair turns into a bird's nest. Castiel rarely had tidy hair when it was short. The added length has made that fact disastrous.

After the fiftieth time Cas blows a gust of air into her hairline, sending strands flying around her face, Dean swears under his breath and says, "Cas, you're killing me."

Castiel looks at him with a touch of guilt as Han shoots Greedo. "Sorry, Dean."

"You thought about tying it back? Hell, I can cut it off. I cut Sam's until he got too cool for it and decided he wanted to look like a damn hippie."

"Whatever, Abercrombie," Sam says without looking up from his book.

Castiel holds a lock of her hair, looking at it like it's an elusive foe. "I'm not sure." Dean rolls his eyes.

"Okay, well, just— Ugh. Stay there, I'll be right back."

When Dean returns, it's with a hairbrush in one hand and a hair tie around his wrist. Sam does look up at that, his little brother senses tuning him in to the crime that has been committed.

"Hey, that's my brush," he says indignantly.

"I'm just borrowing it," Dean mutters, and goes to stand behind where Castiel is sitting on the couch. "Gonna fix Cas's hair."

Sam gives him another look, which he pointedly ignores. Cas turns to look up at him with a question in her eyes, but Dean just gestures for her to turn back around, then gathers the snarls of her hair together in his hands, drawing it off her shoulders and over the back of the couch. He slides his fingers through it as best he can, separating it into sections, then starts from the bottom with the brush, working his way toward Castiel's scalp to detangle it.

Castiel's shoulders draw tight at the first catches of Dean's fingers in her hair, but as he reaches the last knots and coaxes them out, she relaxes, melting back into the cushions. It becomes oddly meditative, the familiar sounds of a movie Dean's seen a dozen times washing over him, an easily solvable task in front of him, and Cas pliantly allowing her head to be tilted this way and that as Dean works, until the brush runs through smoothly and without obstruction. He keeps brushing for a few minutes just for the simple satisfaction of it before he separates the hair into three sections, weaving them together the way he'd been taught once, years before.

When Dean reaches the end of Cas's hair, she's got about a foot long braid that starts out thick at the top and tapers down to a thin, curling lock that Dean ties off with the borrowed hair tie. He's a little disappointed that there's nothing left to do, honestly, and it's probably not the best braid anyone's ever done, but at least it keeps the bulk of it from tangling and getting into Cas's face.

"There, whatcha think?"

"Hmm?" Castiel's voice is a bleary hum, and she seems like she's rousing from a deep sleep, even though angels don't indulge in the practice, surprised to have been awoken.

"How'd you learn to braid hair?" Sam pipes up, looking at the two of them curiously.

"You just didn't get invited to the same slumber parties I did, Sammy." In the list of _weird things Dean did to please a girl in his youth_ , braiding Kim Cox's hair while her friend Esther Park coached him ranks pretty low. What happened after that ranks a little higher.

Dean taps on Castiel's head to wake her up, setting the braid forward over her shoulder so she can see more of it. Cas touches it, strokes her thumb over it. When she finally looks up, her eyes are heavy-lidded and dark. She's lit in blue by the television, her lips parted, and she looks— well—

"Thank you, Dean," she rasps. Dean swallows hard.

"Yeah, no problem, pal," Dean says, and clears his throat, grabbing his beer from where he set it on the coffee table and taking a swig. It's gone warm. He finishes it anyway.

Jack cheers when Luke successfully uses the Force to save the day, and Dean promises him that _The Empire Strikes Back_ is really gonna blow his mind. Castiel spends the rest of the evening absent-mindedly stroking her hair, and when they all go off to their bedrooms without her, Dean tries hard not to remember the shiver he felt when she said his name.

—

Dean is used to being the first one up in the morning. Jack doesn't sleep as much as a normal human would, but he tends to keep to himself while Dean's making coffee and sorting out breakfast, and Sam usually wanders in an hour or so later to turn his nose up at whatever delicious carbs and processed meats Dean offers him. He's still not quite used to Cas being around again, wandering the halls and not sleeping at all. That's one of the reasons he's a little surprised to hear Cas and Sam talking quietly in the kitchen when he comes out of his room at 6 AM.

"...more pressing things to be spending our resources on."

"Yeah, I know, but what could it hurt to just look? If there's a shot, don't you want to take it?"

"The amount of power required for this… With Jack being a target right now, we could be inviting more trouble than it's worth."

"Maybe. Just… think about it, okay? If it's really important—"

"Morning, guys," Dean says, deciding not to be a creeper and inviting himself into the conversation proper. Sam's face is a dead giveaway that it's not a conversation Dean is really welcome in.

"Oh, you're up," Sam says. He's making the same face he did when Dean caught him snooping around Bobby's _Hustler_ collection when he was thirteen. Of course, they'd made a deal where Dean promised not to tell Bobby if he got to look, too, but he doesn't think that play's gonna work here.

"Good morning," Castiel says, and she doesn't look guilty in the slightest, just weary, which makes it even more of a mystery. Her hair is still braided back, just the way Dean left it. In the brighter light of the kitchen, he can see that it's a little bit sloppy, but Cas doesn't seem to mind. Dean sits between the two of them at the table, giving Sam a cheesy smile.

"What's happening?"

"Nothing. I made coffee. You want?" Sam stands abruptly, going to the cabinet to get a mug for Dean before he can even answer.

"Yeah, I want," Dean says, and rolls his eyes. He looks over to Cas to see if there really is anything he should be worried about, or if Sam is just being weird about something stupid, and finds that she's watching him again and running her fingers over the tail of her braid, just as she'd done the night before. Dean's throat feels tight. Sleep gunk or something. "Uh, how's the hair working out for you now?"

"It's… good," Cas says, and her hand stills on her hair, like she's only just realized what she was doing.

"Yeah? Good," Dean says, and accepts the mug of black coffee Sam offers him as an olive branch. "If you need me to, y'know, fix it or anything, let me know."

Sam looks like he might say something to that, but it's to both of their benefits that he catches the look Dean gives him and decides not to press his luck. Jack spares them both any further awkward silence when he comes in holding the laptop and grinning broadly.

"I think I found a case!"

"That's great, Jack," Sam says encouragingly.

"What kinda case?" Dean asks, giving up his chair and waving Jack over to sit down and set the laptop in front of the others. Jack's pulled up an article, the headline of which reads, _"'IT'S A MIRACLE,' CLAIMS ST. ROSE STUDENT BODY AFTER SECOND UNEXPLAINED OCCURRENCE."_

The article helpfully provides shaky video, captured by a student's cell phone, of a bush in front of the school engulfed in flame. Children in uniform crowd around, some shouting in alarm, and there's a collective gasp when the fire is extinguished completely just as suddenly as it reportedly started, seemingly without any intervention.

"Do you think it's an angel?" Sam asks of Castiel, who is frowning at the poor quality video.

"It's hard to tell, just from this," she replies. "I haven't heard anything over angel radio."

"A few weeks ago, there was another 'miracle'," Jack says, and clicks over to a new tab, where a second headline reads, _"FEEDING THE MULTITUDE: MYSTERY DONOR GIFTS 5,000 FISHSTICKS TO ST. ROSE SCHOOL."_

"Huh," Dean says.

"Kind of a stretch, to link the two things together, don't you think?" Sam says, puzzling at the article.

"The fishsticks appeared suddenly in the cafeteria one day," Jack explains. "There's no evidence that anyone actually entered the building in order to leave them there. That's why it was called a miracle."

"Does seem fishy," Dean says, and frowns when no one laughs.

"I don't believe the fishsticks to be divine," says Castiel. "But the burning bush warrants investigation."

Two days later, the four of them are in a motel just outside of Redbud, Indiana, putting the finishing touches on a fake education history for Jack. They've got him dressed just this side of preppy, and Dean's suited up like it's a fed job, though the cover is much more mundane this time around.

"All right, so… My name is Jack Fisher, and you are my parents… Gary and Carrie," Jack says. They spent the car ride over fabricating a backstory for the newest prospective enrollee of St. Rose Christian Academy.

"Are we really going with those names?" grouses Sam, who's typing away trying to get Jack's fake transcripts in order.

"I didn't hear you coming up with anything better," Dean says. He tosses Castiel the only prop she'll need, a fake wedding band that she holds up to the light curiously. "It goes on this one," Dean says, and points to the ring on his own hand.

Castiel's hand closes around the ring. "I know that," she says. Her hair is in a slightly tidier braid today, after Dean offered to help make her look more presentable. For the case, of course. They stayed at a place in Illinois the night before, and in the morning, while Sam and Jack were getting breakfast, Dean had 'borrowed' Sam's hair brush again, sat Cas down on the bed, and unraveled his earlier work to start fresh. He's a little bit prouder of the end result this time. It's more even, and there are fewer loose strands of hair framing Castiel's face. And if he's still riding high from the way she sighed when Dean gave her scalp a little scratch while separating her hair into sections, that's his business. "I've been married."

"Oh, crap, I forgot about that," Sam says quietly.

For half a second, Dean thinks she's talking about Jimmy Novak's wife, when he suddenly remembers exactly what— _who_ —Cas is talking about. All the pleasant feelings he's been riding along with since that morning fade away as the memory settles heavily in his gut.

"Whatever happened to her? Dean, um, told me about it, afterwards, but…" Sam glances at Dean uneasily. Neither of them particularly like remembering that chapter of their lives. Castiel likely doesn't remember it too fondly, either, though he certainly seemed to be enjoying his faith healer phase well enough before Dean showed up and ruined it.

"Yes, I… wasn't in much of a state to check up on her, after… everything that happened," Castiel admits, studying the backs of her tightly closed hands. "I tracked Daphne down years later. She's a follower of Krishna, now, actually, and married to an acupuncturist. They have a child named Prairie."

Dean snorts before he can stop himself. "Uh, sorry," he says, clearing his throat. "How'd, uh, how'd you feel about all that? You miss her?"

"I'm glad for her," Castiel says. "I don't mourn the relationship, if that's what you mean. But Daphne was kind to me when I was alone in the world. She didn't have to be."

"Yeah, _real_ kind," Dean huffs. If he's honest, he doesn't have all that high an opinion of the women Castiel has shacked up with. In Dean's defense, one of the two literally murdered Cas, so he feels entitled to hate her. He guesses that, in comparison, the other one deciding to common-law-marry a naked amnesiac she found wandering in the woods looks pretty good. Cas is his best friend, but she's got a bad tendency to trust anyone who's even a little bit nice to her. "Okay, so I guess you've got tons more practice at this married thing than I do. Take me to school, pookie."

"Of course," Castiel says, sliding the prop ring onto her finger, and her expression does not budge one inch when she adds, "Huggy Bear."

The school is small, a K-12 that only boasts a student population of about two hundred. The grounds surrounding the old brick buildings are immaculately manicured except for the charred shrubbery by the front doors. It's roped off, but the path surrounding it is littered with flowers, signs scrawled with praise and prayers, and burnt-out candles.

Dean wipes his sweaty palms off on his pants while the school's principal, a sturdy woman with wispy, curled white-blonde hair and a neck that sags like a pelican's, stares down her nose at them through her bifocals, a tremulous smile on her thin pink lips.

"Well, it's such a pleasure to meet you, Jack," she says, extending her hand to be shaken. Jack follows through admirably, just like they'd coached him to. "Introduce me to your family?"

Jack smiles broadly. "Principal Andrews, these are my fathers."

Dean smothers a choked noise and turns it into what he hopes is a charming laugh. "Yes! Ha, that's, uh, our little inside joke. You see, my wife's maiden name was actually 'Father,' if you can believe that," he says, and grabs Cas's hand, kissing her on the knuckles in what he hopes is a convincing display of lawful, god-fearing heterosexuality. "Gary Fisher. Pleased to meet you. This is my lovely wife, Carrie."

Principal Andrews doesn't laugh, but she seems to take the explanation calmly enough, her mouth quirking in a tight smile. Dean can feel the sweat making his shirt stick to his back. She turns to Cas, who is utterly still in her seat, her hand still clasped tightly in Dean's.

"Caroline," Cas says, and Dean's a little impressed that she managed to spin his lack of imagination into a real cover. "Good afternoon. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with us."

"Mr. and Mrs. Fisher," the principal says sweetly. "Pardon me, but the two of you look so young, to have a son Jack's age!"

Dean paints on a smile. "Oh, that's real kind of you, ma'am. You know, we do our best to stay healthy. Just clean living and, uh, godliness."

"Are you and your son new to the community?"

"Yes, ma'am," Dean says. "My work takes me all over the country."

"I see," the principal says. Dean had a story all lined up, about being a traveling representative for a national pest control company, but instead of following that line of questioning, she has to go and blindside him by asking, "And how did the two of you meet?"

Dean blinks, floundering, when Cas speaks up. "I saved his life," she says. Dean looks over sharply, his eyes widening in alarm.

The principal's eyes grow a little rounder as well. "Really!"

"Yes," Castiel says. "He had fallen into the pit— a pit," she amends, and Dean's hand tightens on hers, steadying her. "I… pulled him out."

"Carrie's an EMT," Dean says by way of explanation. Cas doesn't sweat, but Dean's palms are sweating enough for the two of them.

"Goodness," Principal Andrews exclaims, and Dean's shoulders relax in increments, because holy shit, she's actually buying it.

Cas smiles the way she does sometimes, usually when she's about to go off and do something reckless for Dean's sake. Not a broad, brilliant smile; her whole face just goes soft, her mouth curves too gently to pinpoint, and her eyes crinkle around the corners, blues warm in the shadow of her long eyelashes.

"When I first found him, I thought, 'His soul is the most beautiful I've ever seen'," she says quietly. "I believed that God had chosen me for him."

The principal sighs, clearly touched. Their ruse is going off without a hitch. Dean would be happier about that if he could feel anything but his heart pounding in his ears. "What a blessing you've been given," she says. Dean forces a smile, unable to look at Cas, whose fingers are still woven between his.

"I'm a very lucky man," Dean says.

The rest of the interview is spent on Jack, how he was homeschooled his entire life (not untrue) and how they hope that spending time with other young people his age who share his values will benefit him (true about the young people, less true about the values), and it all goes as well as they could have hoped. The office is going over Jack's falsified records, Sam has sent through a very sizeable tuition fee which will almost certainly appear to be legitimate, hopefully for the length of time it takes for them to investigate the case, and they leave with the promise that Jack will be allowed to attend classes on a trial basis effective immediately, which is exactly the in they needed. They end the interview with a tour of the campus. If there's anything angelic happening, they would certainly notice, but when they reconvene at the end of the day, they're no wiser about the so-called miracles than they were going in.

"We don't have long before they get suspicious about the money," Sam says. "If we don't see anything that's, you know, in our wheelhouse in a couple days, I say we chalk this one up to a weird prank and move on."

"Jack will be allowed to interact with the students tomorrow at school," Castiel says, and smiles proudly at the boy. "Hopefully he can glean some information from one of them."

"If not, maybe me and Sam can get back to our roots, do a little B 'n E," Dean says. Jack tilts his head in a way that recalls Castiel so strongly it briefly makes Dean think he's got double vision. "Breaking and entering," he explains.

"Right!" Jack grins, just as pleased as punch. Yeah, they're doing a bang-up job raising the antichrist all right.

Dean excuses himself to get dinner for the group. Cas offers to come, but Dean declines. He needs some damn breathing room right now. He hops into Baby, rolls the window down, turns the tunes up, lets the familiar rumble of the engine in his arms and thighs soothe him like a lullaby.

What is he doing? That's the question he has to keep asking himself. He's gotten really good at shuffling around the filing cabinets rattling around in his head, shutting things away and locking the doors and barring them up tight, burying them deep. He'd gotten real good at doing that when it came to Cas. Losing her— losing him over and over and over again, in a hundred different ways. Learning not to expect anything better. Learning not to want more than he could have. Learning not to be surprised or disappointed when he went ahead and wanted things anyway and everything blew up in his face. Learning he still had the capacity to hope again, and always, inevitably, the capacity for his heart to break again. He keeps burying things and they keep on crawling out of their graves, over and over and over. When's he gonna learn?

It's not fair for Cas to come back like this and shake everything up. To give him an excuse to act the way he could never allow himself to. To touch and be touched. To do so openly, where anyone could see them. 

Dean rakes a hand through his hair, groaning aloud, "God, this is so fuckin' gay." He could lie to himself and say it isn't. He's gotten really good at that, too. Instead, he punches the wheel with the base of his fist and turns the car around, going to bring back a bag of sandwiches and potato chips from the corner store like he promised he would. He throws in a Milky Way for Jack, and a fifth of Jim Beam for himself. He's gonna need it if he wants to sleep at all that night, and the two beers he had stashed in the cooler only did so much the night before.

He hides the liquor in the glovebox for later. No need to give Cas a reason to make sad dog eyes at him again.

The next day is just a lot of reading and waiting, which is Dean's least favorite part of any job. There's nothing all that interesting about the town's history or the land the school was built on, from what they've been able to find so far. Dean gets that Sam wants to encourage the kid, that Cas thinks he has some kind of destiny, but that shouldn't mean they just fuck off to Indiana every time Jack has a whim. If Dean wants to be restless in a one-stoplight town, he can do that back home.

He steps outside the motel room to grab the remainders of that fifth out of the glove box, just something to take the edge off, but he's surprised to find Cas is already out there, sitting in the backseat like she's waiting to be driven somewhere. Dean plays along, gets behind the wheel and adjusts the mirror a touch.

"Where to, ma'am?" he drawls. Castiel doesn't laugh. Dean chews the inside of his cheek, letting Cas's eyes bore into him in silence for a minute before he asks. "You okay, Cas?"

"I'm…" Castiel's mouth works silently, trying to form words and falling short. "Just trying to… adjust."

Dean breathes out hard through his nose. "Tell me about it," he mutters.

Cas takes the utterance literally, and Dean knows he's fucked, cause it makes his heart swell with fondness. "It's hard to explain. I don't know if I can."

Dean clicks his tongue. "I mean, if you want advice about coming back from the dead, you're pretty much talking to the expert, buddy."

"Dean," Castiel says, like Dean's said something terribly sad instead of something that's just the plain truth. But she doesn't elaborate, just looks down at her hands in her lap, unspeaking.

Dean wants to ask her: did you mean what you said? He thinks about crawling out of his own grave, about the handprint burned into his arm, long since healed by Castiel herself. He doesn't remember the moment Cas found him, after fighting her way through Hell and a host of demons. All of his memories from Hell are of pain both borne and inflicted. He doesn't remember an angel gripping his soul, judging it worthy, cradling it and placing it back in his body. He doesn't remember being pieced back together and breathed back to life.

But to know the truth might make him do something stupid, like hope, and that's one thing he know he can't afford, so he doesn't ask, and Cas doesn't say, and they sit there in the quiet pretending.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this chapter, please note that the warnings have been updated with a **Graphic Violence** tag. This chapter will reference Dean's experiences in Hell as well as cannibalism, and alludes to past Dean/Benny.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's read, kudosed, commented, and shared so far. You're all great. <3
> 
> * * *

When they meet Jack at the school, he proudly announces that he's met a witch.

"Excuse me?" says Dean.

"Her name is Haleigh," Jack says. "She's nice! She let me sit at her lunch table. She told me the other kids were 'assholes'. I think she's right," he adds, like this fact frustrates him.

"I mean, yeah, kid, I could have told you that. Grade schoolers are the nastiest little bastards on the planet," Dean says. "Get to the part where she's a witch?"

"Well, she didn't tell me she was a witch, but a girl named Jamie stopped me and told me that Haleigh was a gay witch who put curses on people, and that she hid knives in her locker, and that I shouldn't talk to her again. I thought Jamie was lying, but Haleigh _did_ have strange symbols drawn on her notebook."

Dean massages his temples. "Right. Okay. So, what? We break into Sabrina's locker, see if we find any hex bags or whatever?"

"Her name is Haleigh," Jack says kindly.

"You really are Cas's son," Dean says.

They drive back to the motel to loop Sam in, and Jack draws the symbols he could remember from Haleigh's notebook. Mostly it's the kind of stuff Dean would expect from a goth fourteen year old, pentagrams and anarchy symbols and even the classic Cool S, but there is one that catches Cas and Sam's eyes.

"This is real magic," Sam says.

Cas nods. "The sigil is meant to concentrate existing magical power, to… to amplify it. This Haleigh might actually be a witch."

"Right," Sam says slowly. "But, okay, hear me out… Even if she is, is she hurting anyone? All she did was light a bush on fire and make every day Fishstick Friday."

"She's not hurting anyone now," Dean says. "But what if the junior arsonist decides the shrubbery was just practice for the class bully? Shouldn't we, y'know, intervene before she escalates?"

"Are we her guidance counselors now?"

"C'mon, Sam," Dean groans. "You're the one who's always telling me to get in touch with my feelings and singing about how the children are our future."

"Is she even doing it on purpose?"

"If it's not on purpose, all the more reason to step in before she makes a mistake she can't undo."

"I could talk to her," Jack says, and stops the two of them arguing. "She was nice. She let me have her cookie after they ran out in the lunch line. I don't think she's a bad person."

"We should at least figure out where she got the sigil from," Sam concedes. "Okay. I guess… check her locker for any other evidence. If we don't find anything… it's up to Jack."

It's not hard at all to hack into the computer system to find out which locker is Haleigh's. Sam goes in all prepared to flex whatever skills he's got, but the password to the Principal's account is stuck to her monitor with a post-it note. They creep through the empty halls, guided by flashlights, until they come upon it, and they might have known which one was hers anyway just by looking— someone has very helpfully scrawled some rather rude words across the door. Jack frowns at the sight of it, and at first Dean thinks he's upset on behalf of his new little school buddy, but then the padlock snaps open without so much as being touched.

"Holy— Hey, nice trick," he whispers.

"Cas taught me that one," Jack says proudly. Cas pats him on the shoulder while Sam undoes the lock and swings the locker door open.

And it's… normal. There are some magazine pages taped to the inside, pictures of celebrities Dean's never heard of, and a handful of textbooks lined up at the bottom, and an empty shelf above them, and… nothing. Sam hunches over in front of it, reaching a long arm in to root around, looking for anything hidden, anything they might have missed, even flips through the textbooks, but there's just nothing to be found. His jaw works as he shuts the door behind him and replaces the lock, thinking. Dean can tell Sam's just about to admit defeat when they hear a clatter at the far end of the hallway.

Dean snaps to attention, hand over the weapon at his back pocket. The doors to the classrooms all have one small pane of glass in them, and at this hour, all of them are dark, except one. A solid block of light projects against the far wall. They hear a snatch of music start, and then stop.

On full alert, they tread quietly towards the disturbance. Dean and Sam move into position, flanking either side of the door. Dean peeks in at a sharp angle. Inside, there's a black-clad figure holding a knife over a copper mixing bowl. The room is bathed in an otherworldly pink glow. He gives Sam the signal, nods once, counts to three. Sam thrusts the door open and rushes in, flicking the lights on.

There's a high pitched shriek and a clang as the girl inside drops her knife, which strikes the side of the bowl and sends it clattering to the floor, along with its contents. She's got a tripod set up on one of the desks, and she drops to the ground, cowering under it.

"Haleigh?" Jack stands between her and Sam, peering down.

"Who's there?" comes Haleigh's quivering, tearful voice. Dean and Sam exchange looks, relaxing their stances. Whatever Haleigh is, she's pretty convincingly not a threat.

"It's Jack."

A head peeks out from behind the desk, tearful eyes surrounded by thickly-applied purple eyeshadow. "Jack…? Wh— what are you— who are—"

"We're here to help."

Sam examines Haleigh's setup more closely, his eyes scanning over the mess she's made of it, and at the open book on the desk by her tripod. "This is… This is some seriously powerful stuff for a kid to be messing with."

"Who _are_ you?" Haleigh scoots away from Sam, her voice quaking.

"It's okay," Jack says, and kneels down to help Haleigh stand. She's short, pale, and round-faced, with dark, tightly-curled hair, and her school uniform is doctored to the point where she looks like she could be auditioning for _The Craft._ Dean must be old, if stuff from when he was a high schooler has looped back around to being cool again. "This is my family."

Haleigh looks frantically between the three of them, and then at Sam and Dean in particular.

"Your dads?"

"Yes."

"Jack," Dean sputters, "man, you gotta stop telling people— We're _not_ ," he starts to tell Haleigh, who frowns up at him with enormous brown eyes. He coughs, clears his throat. "I'm Dean, this is my brother, Sam, and this over here," he says, "is Cas. We're not here to hurt you."

"Pearl dust, dandelion pods… This, this incantation, this is all wish-granting magic," says Sam. Haleigh looks at him in alarm, her chin wobbling.

"How did you know that?"

"This is what we do," Dean says. Haleigh looks between the four of them, her hands shaking, looking like she'd have bolted already if they weren't blocking the door. "Now just calm down, and tell us what's going on."

"Were you the one who caused the 'miracles'?" Jack asks. Tears track their way down Haleigh's cheeks when she nods.

"Why are you in here recording yourself casting spells?" Sam's doing his very best trust-me-I'm-sensitive voice, and damn him, it works, because Haleigh's shoulders seize and she lets out a great shuddering sob.

"It— it's for TikTok," she whimpers.

"What's TikTok?" comes a chorus of four separate voices. Dean scowls at Sam, who shrugs his enormous shoulders. Haleigh takes her phone off its tripod and thumbs through something on her phone before turning it around so they can see. Dean squints, leaning closer.

There's a video of Haleigh, dressed similarly to how she is now, in a darkened classroom lit only by colorful cycling LEDs. She bops around to a track Dean could only call music if he were feeling very charitable, adding pouches of ingredients to a mortar and pestle and reciting incantations that are helpfully captioned on the tiny screen.

"This is my most popular video," she says in a wavering voice. "I started getting _tons_ more views when I posted real spells."

"How many people have seen this?" Cas asks.

"Um… like… five hundred thousand…"

 _"Five hundred—"_ Sam chokes, running his hand back through his hair and pacing in a circle. "That can't be right."

"I don't know, but that's how many views it's got… Am… Am I in trouble?" Haleigh's eyes fill with tears again. "Are you gonna tell my mom?"

"Look, no, we're not gonna narc on you, kiddo," Dean says. "But you gotta cool it with this shit or someone's gonna get hurt. Magic isn't something you wanna go messing with just to make it big on the internet. Where did you even get all this stuff?"

"Mom and I stayed in the city over Christmas break, and I… I told her I was going to walk down to the Kroger, but there was this cool magic shop, and… I told the lady about Witchtok, and she said I could have the book for free if I did a blessing for her." Haleigh sniffs once, loud and wet. "She was like, super nice."

Sam's lips thin. "Haleigh," he says carefully. "Can you show us the blessing?"

—

They drop Haleigh off quietly, about a block away from her house, so she can sneak back in without being caught. She cooperated with a firm but gentle request to delete some of her videos and to surrender the spell book. Jack's got the name of a magic shop in Indianapolis on a scrap of paper. He traded it for his phone number, which is actually just Cas's phone number, since Jack doesn't have one of his own yet, but Haleigh's promised to give them a call if she's ever in real trouble.

Back at the motel, Sam finally lets how stressed he is show.

"We have no idea what we're walking into here. We have no idea how much bad mojo this witch has been skimming off these kids, or if Haleigh's even the only one."

Calling the spell Haleigh showed them a blessing wouldn't be totally inaccurate, if you happened to be the target. In truth, it was an energy transfer spell. On a small scale, it wouldn't necessarily hurt its caster— much. It had taken some coaxing to get Haleigh to admit that the spell only called for a _little_ bit of blood. If she'd drained herself dry, it might have been a real dark magic power boost, but on its own, it wouldn't do much.

Unless you somehow managed to get hundreds of people across the country to participate.

"Honestly, I'm kinda surprised no one's tried it sooner," Dean says. "Modernized the dark arts. Friggin'... crowdsourced human sacrifice."

"I don't like going in half-blind either, but we have to put a stop to it," Cas says, then turns her gaze to Jack, who's already been texting rapidly with Haleigh on Cas's phone. The kid's only a few months old, and he's already glued to that damn screen, Dean thinks, amusing himself. "You've done good here, Jack. Without you, we might never have known."

"She's asked for a photo to use in her contacts. Can I take one with you?"

Dean snorts. "I think she probably just wants one of you."

"But it's Cas's phone."

"Okay, here," Dean says, and grabs Cas's phone out of Jack's hand. He waves Cas and Jack over, until they're in the frame together. "Do a duckface."

Dean snaps the photo right when Cas squints, asking, "What face does a duck make?" It might be the funniest goddamn thing he's ever seen.

"There you go," he says, and hands the phone back. "Send me a copy of that, will you?"

"I'll hit the net again, see what I can find out about this shop," Sam says, a deep crease between his eyebrows as he settles into a chair and flips open the laptop. Dean walks over, ruffles his hair, and Sam slaps his hand away, scowling.

"Unclench," Dean says. "Leave it for the morning. We've fried bigger fish. We'll ride in, do some recon, all goes well, maybe we put a bullet in a witch. Wham bam."

"Yeah. Yeah, okay."

—

Dean looks around the room. He could call it his. He's been here longer than anywhere else. Longer than Lawrence, longer than Lebanon. This was the first place he made his own, the first place he left his mark on.

There's a soul right there on the rack, all lined up, all strapped down, waiting for him to leave his mark there, too.

Things take shape the way he expects them to, here. Days pass like years, but bodies mean little beyond what meaning his human mind assigns to them. The soul he sees takes a familiar shape. He spent a year with it, fighting next to it, getting close to it. For a short while, real close. Broad shoulders, a strong jaw, a close-cropped beard. Bright blue eyes looking up at him, trusting him. The man on the rack is nude, his thick chest and belly covered in a layer of downy hair, rising and falling evenly.

"It's all right, brother," Benny says. "Go ahead."

Benny winces at the first cut, his throat working. By the time Dean gets to the third, he's screaming. As long as Dean's been doing this, it starts to fade out into just so much background noise. Anyway, the screams are nothing compared to the sound the sound the saw makes when it hits bone, or the crack of the ribs.

When he reaches into the cavity, Benny's lips are slick with blood. Benny's mouth always tasted like copper. He finds what he's looking for, clutches it in his fist. Benny's bright eyes have gone hazy. Dean knows what it feels like, has been on the other end of it often enough to know that at a certain point, the capacity to process the pain fails, all sensations blurring into a great blankness. He's felt that way for longer than he can remember now.

"It's okay," Benny says. His voice is nothing but a wet sound, the sound of meat hitting a cutting board.

The heart pulls free with some effort. Dean is coated to his bicep in gore, the smell of it thick and metallic. It's a greater effort still to get his teeth through it, to tear the meat and chew.

This is how the Angel finds him. Its thousand eyes burn with holy fire, its many wings flapping so greatly it nearly sends Dean to his knees. He can't look directly at it. It sears with pain when he tries, pain he didn't know he had the capability to feel any longer. God help him, it _hurts_.

A hand grips his shoulder, and something washes over him, so cold it burns. He feels like he's being flayed apart. He wants it. He wishes the Angel would burn him to ash, and salt the ashes, and burn them again, until nothing is left.

The voice rattles in his skull like rocks from a cliffside: _Dean Winchester is saved_.

—

Dean wakes up in Redbud, Indiana. Sam is asleep in the bed next to his, and Jack is on the pull-out couch across the room. Dean's clothes are damp and tacky with sweat, the sheets half torn off the mattress underneath him. Castiel is sitting next to him, holding his shoulder. Some of her hair has come loose, and it stretches down toward him as she leans over. It's hard to make out her expression in the dark. Dean feels viscous blood running down his throat, choking him. His chest works, struggling to take breath.

"Dean, it's okay. You're okay," Castiel whispers fervently. "You're having a nightmare. It's all right."

Dean tries to speak, and it comes out as a whimper. Castiel's face crumples, and she swipes a thumb across his forehead, cradling his face. Ice-cold, her grace shivers through him, then just as suddenly, he's warm all over, the rabbit-pace of his heartbeat easing. His throat relaxes, and air rushes into his lungs. His head swims with it. Cas just keeps stroking her fingers across his temple, through his hair. When he feels like he can sit up without getting dizzy, he pushes her away, tearing the sheets off and staggering into the bathroom. He can't look her in the eye right now.

He takes a shower even though it's 3 AM, scrubs until he can't feel blood caking under his nails, and when he comes back out wrapped in a towel, Castiel is still sitting right where he left her on the bed, watching the bathroom door. He rushes past, digging for his clothes in his travel bag.

Cas doesn't say anything. Dean isn't sure if that's better or worse than being asked if he's okay again. Dean yanks his clothes on, beyond caring how much Cas can see. "I'm going outside," he rasps. "Don't wait up."

The whiskey is right where he left it in the glove compartment, and he takes a long pull, gasping after he swallows, his throat burning.

The Hell dreams still get him, sometimes, even when he's had enough to drink to shut his brain up, but it's never been quite like this before. He's never dreamt of that moment. He knows it didn't really happen like that, that Benny had never set foot in Hell. He's been in Purgatory since before Dean was born. But some other soul _was_ there, and another before that, and another, and another. Too many to count.

Dean thinks about Cas, holding his hand, calling his soul 'beautiful'. He thinks about Benny, all loyalty and trust, while he stood there and watched Dean take a blade to his neck. Then he drinks until he can't think about it anymore.

—

Indianapolis is, by technical definition, a city. Dean's never found it all that much to write home about, though compared to Redbud, it's a booming beacon of civilization.

The shop they're looking for, The Ivory Key, is tucked into a crumbling brick building in a quiet neighborhood. The place is choked with tchotchkes and smells powerfully of incense, beaded ribbons and talismans dangling low from the ceiling so that Sam has to duck to avoid getting a faceful. A bell rings when they open the door, and a hunched white woman in her fifties emerges from behind a curtain, squinting at them through thick-lensed eyeglasses that would look at home in an old episode of _Unsolved Mysteries_.

"Afternoon," she says.

"Ma'am," Dean says, with his most charming smile.

"You looking for anything special, or just looking?"

"Well, we were hoping you might be able to tell us something about this?" Dean's hand is over the gun in his pocket when Sam holds up the spell book for the clerk to see.

Her eyes flick to Sam's. Aside from that, she doesn't react. Dean holds position, his fingers twitching. Before either of them can move, another voice comes from the back room, thin and lilting.

"It's all right, dear. Let them come back."

The clerk scans over the four of them, tense and untrusting, but after a moment, she holds the curtain back, ushering them in. Dean catches Castiel's eye, then Sam's. He pulls the pistol from his pocket, holds it ready just in case, letting the clerk see him do it. _Try anything and I'll smoke you and your friend,_ is the implicit warning, but she's not fazed by it in the slightest.

The back room is lined with shelves and drawers. A candle flickers away on a desk littered with jars and stacks of books. In the center of all this is an overstuffed chair, in which a small, fine-boned woman sits. Her face is long and sharp, her copper-red hair cropped short and curling around her ears. Her vibrant eye makeup matches the jewel tones of her long dress, and she reclines with all the careless attitude of the cat who caught the canary.

"Hello, boys," says Rowena, her painted mouth curling into a smile. She gives Sam a long once-over before her eyes drift across to the rest of them, and when she lands on Cas, her smile curves even wider, her eyebrows rising into her hairline. _"Hello, girls!_ Is that you, angel face?" Cas shifts awkwardly next to Dean, and Rowena's eyes sparkle with mirth, taking her in. "You look _fabulous_. Your fashion sense could still use a lot of help, but I have to say, whoever did your work is an _artist_." She leans forward, her motions slow and deliberate. "If you'd have let me do it, I could have helped you find a better ensemble. But I suppose that just wasn't in the cards, aye?"

Cas just frowns at her, at a loss. Dean doesn't really know what to say either, because last he heard, he was pretty sure Rowena was a smoking pile of bones crushed under Lucifer's heel.

"Go on," she says, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Ask me."

Sam speaks on behalf of the both of them. "Rowena... _how_ are you—"

"Samuel, dearest, you should know better than to think something piddly like dying means anything to me, by now." A finely manicured hand reaches up to toy with a short lock of hair behind her ear. "I _always_ have a back-up plan."

Sam huffs, his jaw working. "Does that back-up plan involve tricking a bunch of kids into doing blood sacrifices? That how you got juiced back up?"

 _"Blood sacrifices."_ Rowena scoffs, her mouth round and offended. "Papercuts! They've had worse going for their shots at the doctor's. It was just a wee little gift, in exchange for all the help I gave them. Surely there's nothing wrong with that."

Sam frowns down at her. She sighs laboriously.

"Oh, Sam, I did miss your moral posturing so."

"You've got five minutes to explain yourself, Rowena," Dean says. He clicks the gun's safety off as punctuation.

"What's to explain?" Rowena scoffs. "A little pinch here, a little dab there, all freely given, and not a drop of that power will ever be missed! I'm not harming anyone!"

"You manipulated little girls into bleeding themselves for you," Dean says. "How much teen spirit you got coursin' through your veins right now?"

Rowena's smile falls. "Would you like to find out, lad?"

Cas rushes forward, standing in front of Dean like a shield. Dean grabs Cas's shoulder, wrenching her aside, but Rowena doesn't move an inch from where she's sitting, enveloped by the chair.

"We can't let you keep doing this," Sam says. "Argue all you want, but you know if you hurt innocent people, we are duty bound to hunt you."

" _Hunt_ me?" Rowena huffs a voiceless laugh. Her arm moves, and Dean raises the gun in his hand on instinct, but she doesn't cast. She reaches down slowly and deliberately, grasping something by her feet, propped against the arm of the chair— a cane, black with gold trim— and pushing herself to standing. Rowena's arm begins to tremble with effort. Her feet haltingly anchor her to the floor, knees threatening to buckle underneath her. Her knuckles are white, the skin thin where she grips the handle. Dean hears Sam breathe in sharply when she begins to flicker, like a TV signal going out. One moment, she's resplendent in royal purples. The next, she's pale and gray. The shadows under her eyes are pronounced, her face clean of makeup. When she reaches her full height, she looks very small in the cramped room. "Look at me. Look at what he's made of me. Would you call it hunting to kill an animal caught in a trap, wasting away?"

"Rowena," Sam says, stricken.

"He made a _ruin_ of me." Rowena's voice is low and wounded. Her body quakes to stand. She looks like she might crumple, but Sam ducks to catch her arm, his hand at her back guiding her back into her chair. "I can't just— I can't just lie here, helpless, when he might—"

"Lucifer is gone," Sam says, bent to one knee. Dean hates the way Sam sounds as he says it, like he's a child again, in need of protection that Dean isn't big enough or strong enough to give him. The very thought of Lucifer reverts Sam to a smaller version of himself, and he doesn't even have to be in the same room to do it. He doesn't even have to be on the same damn plane of existence. "He's trapped. He can't get to you here."

"Even if I believed that was true," says Rowena, steeling herself, "Which I do not, because I didn't live this long by being a damned fool… I'm as helpless as a babe now. I survived, yes, but the cost was tremendous. As you can see." She breathes out a trembling sigh. "I didn't want you to see."

Sam's hand is balled into a fist by Rowena's knee. She slides a hand over it. Dean can see the slight tremor as she does so.

"I want myself back," she says. "I want to be whole again. Surely you can understand that, Sam?"

Dean's head falls back in frustration. He already knows how this is going to end, because he knows his brother. He glances over at Cas to see if he can at least get some backup in his displeasure, but his heart sinks when he sees the look on Cas's face. Outnumbered two to one, then.

Sam looks back over his shoulder, pleading. Dean clenches his teeth.

"So, what, you just want to let her get off scot-free?"

"That's not— Of course not, but… Come on, Dean." Sam pushes himself up, walks over to talk quietly to Dean, like they're not in a room the size of a walk-in closet. "I think we should keep an eye on her for a while."

"Keep an— you mean you want to move to goddamn Indiana, or you want Rowena to be our newest roommate?"

Rowena scoffs. "He means he wants to put me under house arrest."

Sam gestures like he actually thinks that's a great idea and not a desperate attempt to soften the blow of whatever it is he thinks he's doing. "Yeah, kind of. Look, we can watch her, make sure she doesn't do anything, you know—"

"Evil," Dean says.

"Necessary," Rowena corrects.

"Stupid," Sam says. "And Rowena, you'll be safe with us. I promise you, nobody wants to keep Lucifer locked up more than we do." Sam sounds so earnest it hurts, and even Rowena's resistance seems to have softed. "You can get your strength back. It's not a terrible idea. Right Cas?"

Dean gives Cas his best _please do not betray me_ look. It has no effect.

"Dean," she says. Here it comes. "If we give Rowena time to heal, she might be able to help us with something important down the line."

"What is so damn important that we need to shack up with the witch? Do I have to remind you the shit she's done to us? To you in particular?"

"I'm fully aware," Cas says. She's got that stubborn look in her eye that Dean's seen a hundred times before, usually before she did something to recklessly endanger herself. "But she needs our help. And so does Mary."

Dean's stomach turns over, and he knows he's lost the argument. Not just to Cas and Sam, but to himself. "She can't… You think she can help us save Mom like this?"

"Not now. But maybe if we help her recover, she'll be inclined to help us when she's able."

"I knew I liked you, Castiel." Rowena says. "Listen to your very sensible feathered friend and your much more handsome brother, Dean."

Dean's cheek spasms.

"Fine, whatever," he says. He pockets his gun, brushing Cas off when she goes to touch his shoulder and storming back out into the shop. "Trust the witch. It's on your ass when it goes south."

— 

Rowena has more bags than can fit in the trunk. She insists that she will have her friend send them along, and makes Sam sit with her in the backseat holding one. She's asked Cas to sit on her other side, so Jack's got shotgun while she's sandwiched between her and Sam in the back. Dean's got a headache already.

Rowena also insists that she won't stay anywhere with less than three stars, and as they're driving through Missouri she does some wizardry on her phone and then dictates exactly where they'll be going, like she's the queen of the road and not some wrung-out criminal on a semi-voluntary trip to a very homey prison cell.

Seeing their set of rooms softens Dean's displeasure a little bit, though. He can count on one hand the number of times he's stayed in a hotel as nice as... whatever this one is. He peers around at the room, catching the Marriott logo on a pad of paper by one of the beds. Right, that one.

They've been cagey with her about exactly who Jack is, which is probably for the best, because right now they're getting along swimmingly. Jack is polite and respectful and has the benefit of never having met Rowena when she was trailing around after the King of Hell alternately trying to get into his good graces or have him killed, depending on her fickle moods. Right now she's propped up on a pile of fluffy white pillows in the middle of a bed much larger than she, introducing Jack to the wonderful world of reality television. Dean's never met a "real" housewife who looked like _that_. He hopes it doesn't give Jack a warped view of the world to see a bunch of rich people with no jobs except to bitch at each other about brunch invitations all day.

"Free breakfast," Sam says, looking at the listed amenities with raised eyebrows.

"Don't think you can bribe me with a stale muffin," Dean says. He hopes Sam doesn't expect Jack to stay in this room with Rowena alone. He doesn't trust her not to figure out Jack's a little more juiced up than a regular kid and try to take advantage of that, or worse, find out he's _Lucifer's_ kid.

"There's a self-serve waffle maker," Sam adds with a little smile. Dean points an accusing finger at him.

"Don't think you can bribe me with all-you-can-eat waffles, either." Dean mills around the room, peeking into what he hopes is a mini-bar, but is actually just an empty mini-fridge. He slaps the door shut with an irritated noise.

"I miss waffles," Cas says a little wistfully. Dean puts a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"I promise not to eat any in front of you, then."

"I like watching you eat," she says. "You enjoy it."

Dean's neck feels hot. He turns away, fiddling with the dial on the AC unit by the window.

"This is all on my tab, boys," Rowena says. "There's a restaurant downstairs, but I think some room service is in order, don't you?"

"Do we even want to know how you've got the money for this?" Sam says, looking down at her with his arms crossed over his broad chest, like she would ever be intimidated by that.

"No, you absolutely don't," she says sweetly, and flips open the menu on her side table.

Dean tries to relax and enjoy the rare luxury, escaping to the second room to take the hottest shower he can after eating the most overpriced hamburger he has ever encountered. He uses all the little free shampoos and soaps and lotions, toweling off and changing out of his car-stale clothes. There's some dumbshit movie on about Samuel L. Jackson fighting a bunch of snakes on a plane, but all the cussing's been edited out, and maybe another time that would be hilarious enough to distract him, but his brain is buzzing, and all he can think about is that a drink would really quiet that the hell down.

When he goes on a hunt with Sam, he expects they'll see some kind of action. A little adrenaline, a little hot-blooded firefight. Maybe he ends the day with a few bruises and a split lip, or worse, but he also sleeps like a damn baby. He woke up this morning expecting a chase. Now he's like a dog in a kennel, all pent up with nowhere to run.

He goes downstairs and tries having a drink at the hotel bar, but that just makes him feel itchy and out of place. It's not a shithole, is the problem. He feels anonymous and forgettable in dive bars, maybe just interesting enough to find someone to spend the night with and nothing more. But here, it's just guys in dress pants and CNN on the television. He puts the tab on their room's bill and clears out after just one drink.

The little general store in the lobby proves more fruitful. They sell snacks and toiletries there, but they also sell liquor. Dean takes his buddy Jack Daniels outside so they can lean against the side of the Impala together, drinking and watching the sun go down over the office park next door.

Cas approaches when it's just getting dark. Her hair is loose around her shoulders. She must have let it down while the weird little family vacation they've got going was watching TV upstairs. Dean kind of wants to get his hands in it. He buries the urge by shoving a hand in his pocket and taking another swig.

"Here you are," she says, shoulders sinking in relief. "I thought maybe you would be downstairs. The clerk told me you left."

"Just gettin' some air," Dean says, and slides to the side a little bit to allow Cas room. She hesitates a moment before joining him, her shoulder nearly touching his where she leans against the side door. She looks up at the sky, faded blue where it meets the horizon. There's too much light pollution out here. Dean wonders if angels can see the stars even when it's light out, or if they just see the same barely-there pinpricks humans do. "Want some?"

Cas looks at the bottle in his hand like it's a puzzle. "You know I can't really taste it."

"'Sup to you." Dean holds the bottle out towards her with a shrug. She looks at him a moment, then takes it, bringing the bottle to her lips and taking a generous sip. She lets it sit in her mouth a moment, then swallows. The shine it leaves on her lips catches the glint of the streetlights in the parking lot. She hands the bottle back to Dean, her head canting to the side. "Well?"

"It tastes like Diet Coke."

"What?" Dean snorts. "How do you figure?"

"Everything does," Cas says, her voice low, and her face falls into a little pout of consternation. Dean tries to smother a smile. "It's all just… molecules and chemical compounds. The only thing I can compare it to is Diet Coke. It _always_ tasted like that, even when I was human."

Dean can't stop himself from grinning at that. "Well, I guess this is just one more thing I'll have to enjoy for the both of us." He nudges her shoulder with his, then takes another drink, trying not to notice her watching him.

They sit in companionable silence for a while, watching the sky grow darker and listening to cars pass by on the highway. Dean steals a glance, looking at the dark hair that spreads out over her shoulders.

"You took it out," he says. Cas stills, but doesn't look at him. "You want me to fix it again, or d'you like it better down?"

"I…" Dean feels his face growing hot the longer it takes her to say anything. He clears his throat.

"Just offering, you don't gotta. I mean, if you don't want—"

"No, I like it," she says. "You can… Please, if you don't mind."

"Nah, it's no problem," Dean says, and sets the bottle on the ground, gesturing for Cas to stand in front of him, facing away. She goes obediently, tilting her head back to allow him better access.

He doesn't have a hairbrush, which is how he excuses getting all ten of his fingers on her head and scratching his way down her scalp, gently tugging his fingers through to get the tangles out. There aren't many snags this time, and he gradually combs it out, tucking it behind her ears and trying to brush it away from her face as best he can before he starts braiding. There's a few wispy little stray hairs at the back of her neck that escape no matter how much he tries to manipulate them. When he reaches the end, it takes real effort to summon his voice to ask if she's got a tie. Cas holds up her hand. The tie is secured around her wrist. Dean slips his finger under it, easing it over and off her rigid hand. Her fingers are long, the nails blunt and short.

Dean ties off the braid, then gives it a gentle tug. "All right, you can turn around now."

Castiel turns where she stands. Shadows carve hard lines across her features and make her blue eyes as dark as the sky. A long, curling lock of hair rests on her cheek.

"How do I look?" Cas holds herself very still. Dean's teeth swipe across his lip.

"Uh, you've got a little... " He points, then reaches out, brushing it away from her forehead. Cas sucks in a sharp breath. Her eyelashes flutter. In the dark, she looks so much like her old vessel. 

Dean startles when she reaches up, grasping his wrist and holding it still.

"Stop." Castiel's voice is strained, like it's taking all of her strength just to speak. Dean's stomach drops and cold anxiety creeps in. Her fingers tighten on his wrist. Dean flinches.

"Sorry. Shit, Cas, I didn't mean to—" Dean tries to pull his hand away. Castiel holds tight, swaying into his space, so close that his breathing stirs the hair falling into her face. He tenses, sucking in his stomach, trying to curl away from her. Dean's breath feels too loud, his heartbeat in his ears drowning out the sound of his own voice. "Cas?"

"Please," Cas breathes. "Please, just—" Her gaze is fixed somewhere low, unable to meet his eyes. "You keep touching me," she says. Her voice is practically a whisper. "If you don't stop, I won't be able to stop _wanting_ it."

Dean swallows hard, unable to move. "Why the hell would I want you to stop?"

Castiel's eyes snap to his, and then he's being backed against the car, his wrist gripped tightly in her fist, pinned to the metal. Her body slots up against his, knee to chest, but it's Dean who falls in to press their mouths together. Castiel is hard and unyielding against him, lips parting in shock, nothing but bruising pressure and teeth, until Dean licks his way in, canting his head until the kiss shifts into an easy, wet slide. Cas groans into his mouth. Dean's free hand reaches up, finding the curve of Castiel's jaw and cradling it, urging Cas closer.

He's thought about this before. He can admit that to himself, here in the moment. He's wondered what it might be like to kiss Cas, to be kissed by Cas. Fleeting thoughts of clueless fumbling from a being who had next to no experience, or later, thoughts of a bloodied mouth meeting his, tasting copper and then healing it all with a touch. None of that compares to the reality of Castiel crowding against him like any space between them is too much, opening up for him so eagerly. A leg slots between his, and, helplessly, Dean grinds against it. Sparks of pleasure burst through him, up his spine, until he's dizzy with it.

To their left, a burst of unfamiliar laughter and catcalls startles him. He yanks his head back, knocking it against the roof of the car. Someone's seen them. Of course someone has, he thinks furiously, because he and Cas are making out in the fucking parking lot where _anyone_ could see them. Icy cold panic lights up his nerves, killing all the giddy excitement of the minutes before. Someone _saw_ them. They'll _know._

Frantic, Dean scans the parking lot to see a group of twenty-somethings in rumpled dress shirts, all men, who look like they've already been partying for a while. They're jeering and hollering at the two of them. He shoves Cas away, stumbling back and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

But the guys just move on, heading into the hotel lobby. In the quiet, Dean looks back at Castiel, and it hits him. They don't know who Cas is. They can't see anything but what their eyes tell them. As far as the men who just walked by know, Castiel is a woman, and Dean's a man.

The relief rocks him like a wave. It's followed soon after by shame, creeping in sick and slow, because what kind of a coward does that make him?

He swipes his hand back through his hair. His mouth still tastes like whiskey.

"Sorry," he croaks. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't've— _Shit_."

"Dean," Cas starts, but Dean just grabs the bottle up from the pavement, staggering back towards the building.

"Fuck. I'm sorry." Dean can't look at her, can't look at the way he's leaving her with kiss-bitten lips, alone, in the dark, because he's too chicken-shit not to. "I can't."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy Birthday, Dean Winchester! For your birthday I got you this chapter! What's in it? Oh, uh, well, yikes.
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who's read and commented! Each comment is a glittering jewel and I have made a nest of them. Caw caw.
> 
> Extra warnings for this chapter: discussion of Cas's gender presentation in a way that might recall a forced transition for some readers, references to sexual comments made towards a minor, self-applied slurs, implied parental abuse. There'll also be references to past Dean/Rhonda Hurley and Dean/Lee Webb.
> 
> * * *

It's only by the grace of whiskey that Dean sleeps at all, and he wakes up with a dry, gummy mouth and a headache that threatens to turn his stomach. He glances around the room, gray morning light filtering through the curtains, and finds it empty, which leaves him free to grab the half-empty bottle by his bed and take another drink, something to dull the ache. He fishes a couple aspirin out of his bag and washes them down. He brushes his teeth, cause he's not stupid and Sam has a working nose, and spends a long time afterwards washing his face with cold water, wondering if the sink is deep enough to drown himself in.

When he thinks he could pass for human, he goes to the next room over, rapping on the door before he uses the spare keycard to open it. Sam is inside, just zipping up his bag, already dressed and showered, his hair still wet and curling behind his ears. He signs, "quiet", and nods toward the bed on the far side of the room. Rowena is still sleeping, deeply ensconced in the many pillows bracketing her small body. Sam follows him out into the hallway, leaving the door slightly ajar behind them.

"She passed out pretty early," he says. "I figure we let her sleep while we get some food, then hit the road."

"So you trust Sleeping Beauty not to make a break for it?"

Sam purses his lips. "I don't think it's an act." He can tell Dean's about to protest, because he adds, " _But_ I'm gonna stay up here. You bring breakfast back. Is that enough of a compromise for you?"

Dean scrubs a hand over his face, stubble prickling at his palm. "Yeah, all right."

"Is Jack up?"

"I thought he might be with you, but I guess he went downstairs already."

"Cas?"

Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, shrugs. "I dunno, haven't seen her." Sam looks at him oddly. Dean fidgets. "Okay, I'll be back with the nonfat yogurts for Her Highness and her handmaiden."

That makes Sam roll his eyes, which is much more comfortable territory for Dean. He escapes down the hall, riding the elevator to the main floor, where the smell of syrup and coffee is thick. It's still early, so there's only a few people milling around the counters laden with breakfast fare, and he sees Jack and Cas at their table immediately. Jack has a plate entirely filled with one fat, golden-brown waffle in front of him, stacked high with cream and fruit. On another day, Dean might have joined him, but right now, the thought turns his stomach. Castiel's back is turned to him. He wonders if he can slip by, grab an armful of food, and disappear again before either of them notice.

He loads up a tray with whatever's quickest. None of it looks that good to him at the moment, honestly, but he can't have Sam giving him any more Concerned Sam™ looks. Yogurt cups, a few dinged-up bananas and oranges, a single-serving box of Apple Jacks, a muffin, and two coffees. He can probably choke at least one of those things down.

Jack calls his name a couple of times. Dean keeps adding to his tray.

"Dean?" A finger taps his shoulder. Jack waves to him when he turns.

"Oh, hey, morning. Didn't hear you," he lies. "Sleep okay?"

Jack has a little line between his eyebrows. If he can tell Dean's full of shit, he doesn't say anything.

"Yes. I woke up at four, but you slept through the television show about the rotisserie oven."

"Oh, damn," Dean says. "Sorry I missed that."

"Don't be," says Jack. "There wasn't much of a story. They just kept repeating the same things over and over. It did sort of make me hungry, though?"

"That's how they get you. I'm taking these up to Sam and Rowena, tell Cas we're gonna get packed up in about a half hour, okay?"

Jack smiles and returns to their table. Dean tries to hoof it before his eyes follow Jack all the way, but Cas sees him before he rounds the corner, her face square and still. Dean's heart feels lodged in his throat. The car ride is going to suck.

Dean is a little weirded out to see that Rowena's enfeebled act really might not be an act. It takes a while to stir her after he and Sam eat, Dean choking down the little box of cereal dry and chasing it with black coffee. He tosses the rest of the food into the cooler and saves it for the road. Sam ends up asking the concierge for a wheelchair, and he carts Rowena downstairs to the car, where she sits in the back between him and Cas, dozing intermittently against Sam's shoulder for the first hour.

When she finally wakes, it's just to tell Dean to put on something a little less grating. He grumbles for a minute before switching out _Back in Black_ for _Rumours_. Stevie Nicks is probably a witch, so Rowena's bound to like her. Sam peels her an orange, and she eats it slice by slice, smiling a little when "Second Hand News" transitions into "Dreams." Nailed it.

Cas just gazes out the window, watching Missouri scrolling by. Dean trains his eyes back on the road, knuckles white against the steering wheel.

"Like a heartbeat drives you mad," Stevie croons, "in the stillness of remembering what you had, and what you lost."

"Shut up," Dean mutters.

"What?" Jack looks at him from the passenger's seat.

"Nothing. Uh, that guy's bumper sticker," he says, and points ahead on the road. It's as good an excuse as any. Jack squints to read it.

"My child is an honor student at Lake Bridge Junior High."

"Important lesson, Jack," says Dean. "Grades are meaningless. Honor students are just kids who know how to game their test scores. In the real world, none of that shit matters."

"You're just saying that cause you never did well on tests," Sam says.

"Yeah, so? When do I need to know how to _solve for x_ out here in the field? I don't. Cause what matters is I know how to do my job, and I do it well. Doesn't matter how much useless shit you memorize."

"Like the useless shit we're always tearing through the library for?"

"That's not useless shit," Dean grumbles. "Anyway, _you're_ just mad because we never stayed in one school long enough for you to make honor roll."

Sam scoffs. "Yeah, like dad ever would've let me put one of those bumper stickers on the car."

"Oh, absolutely goddamn not. He would've disowned you."

"Yeah, well, he did that anyway," Sam says. Dean's teeth clench, and he breathes out hard through his nose.

"Good for me I'm a fuckin' moron, then."

"No you aren't," Cas snaps. Dean, startled, looks back to see her reflected in the mirror. She still won't look at him, but her cheeks are splotchy red, her lips thin and pale.

Dean lets it drop, even though he would have thought Cas would be the first person to call him a fucking moron. She's done it often enough before. He doesn't know what the hell she's thinking right now. He doesn't have the first goddamn clue.

"When the rain washes you clean you'll know," sings Stevie.

 _Shut up,_ Dean thinks, and turns the music up a notch anyway.

They've just crossed over the state line into Kansas when Rowena perks up enough to start asking Castiel questions.

"So, Big Bird," she chirps. She's taking little pinches of the muffin Dean hadn't touched and popping them into her mouth daintily between sentences. "What made you decide to make the switch?"

"I'm sorry?" Castiel had been leaning up against the door, her chin in her hand, until Rowena leaned in and playfully smacked her arm.

"Your transformation! I have to say, I'm very happy for you. You must know how I've always felt a kinship with other powerful women."

"It wasn't really a choice," Cas says. Dean tries to keep his eyes on the road, but he can hear the frown in her voice.

"Oh, yes, I've heard that said," Rowena says. "I know of a few witches who started on the path because their desire to transfigure themselves was really more of an imperative."

Castiel hesitates before speaking again. "You misunderstand. I didn't choose to become this way. When I was… returned to life, it was by an entity that seemed enraged by my very existence. And it knew me. It knew my life, my thoughts, my—" There's a pause where Castiel seems to be remembering. She'd been vague on the details, but the Empty sounded like a pretty shitty way to spend eternity. "It wanted to be rid of me, but it also seemed to take satisfaction in tormenting me. I believe that choosing this… visage for me was its idea of a great cosmic joke."

Dean can hear the bitterness in her voice. His hands flex against the steering wheel. He leans on the gas a little harder. It's still a few hours to Lebanon, but he wants out of this car as soon as possible.

"Oh dear," Rowena says. "Well, then, I am sorry." She sits still in the tense silence for a while before she adds, "But, you know, if you ever wanted to fix that little problem…"

"That's not necessary," Castiel says.

"If you say so. And of course I'm in no state to carry out such complex magicks at the mo. I'm just saying, you have options. You needn't limit yourself!" Rowena reaches over to pat Castiel on the knee. "Consider it, dear."

Dean looks back to see Castiel's face, but she's tucked it back into her hand, and she spends the rest of the drive quietly staring out the window.

It's a relief when they finally pull into the garage at the bunker, to be stretching his legs and looking forward to the prospect of a dark, quiet bedroom to nurse his headache in. It's also a relief to put some space between him and Cas, because being constantly aware of her at his back was starting to make him feel kind of insane. Apparently, Cas feels the same way, because she's gone before Dean's done unloading the car. He and Jack carry the bags inside while Sam helps Rowena get to her feet.

Dean's down in the library when Sam and Rowena make it to the staircase. He hears her say, "Samuel, be a dear," followed by Sam's little noise of acquiescence, and then Dean's obviously having a stroke, because there's no way his little brother is carrying that woman down the stairs. She has an arm slung over his shoulder and the other holding her cane in her lap, and when they reach the foot of the steps, he sets her down gently on her feet.

Rowena gives Dean a sharp smirk as they pass. Sam, trailing behind her, looks at Dean like he would gladly murder him with his bare hands right there if Dean so much as blinked at him the wrong way. Dean decides not to test that hypothesis.

He spends the rest of the afternoon tending to Baby, getting under her hood to make sure everything's tip-top and giving her a good wash and rinse when he's through. Maintaining a car is practically a meditative state for Dean, down to the mechanical simplicity of the fact that all the parts in front of him make sense, that all problems are ultimately solvable. When he's done, he offers to pick up takeout from the Chinese place a town over just for an excuse to be alone a while longer, and when he brings back two heavy paper bags full of food, he grabs the carton of beef lo mein and takes it back to his room without a second thought.

The thing is, he knows he's being a coward, and he still can't stop himself. It's a gut reaction, as intrinsic to him now as sleeping with his gun under his pillow, or doing a sweep of a room every time he walks in, checking for potential exits or ambush points. It's instinct, written into his code somewhere so deep he can't really pick out one particular instance to say, _There, this is the reason. This is where it started._ He can't actually remember the first time his dad put a gun in his hand, held his arm up the right way, taught him how to keep his finger near the trigger but never on it until he was ready to shoot, ready to kill. But he can remember the repetition of it, the constancy of it, the drill of it, every single day until eventually he could do it in his sleep.

In the same way, he can't really remember the first time he thought that maybe there was something wrong with him. Something that people could sense but he couldn't control. He can't remember the moment he realized he would have to work at it to make sure no one noticed, to make sure he passed without a second glance, to make sure nobody asked him any questions he wasn't prepared to answer. The knowledge is just ingrained in him now, as sure as the fact that he's Dean Winchester, that he's John and Mary Winchester's firstborn. There are things men don't do without attracting the wrong kind of attention, and there are things men don't do period. No amount of evidence to the contrary has yet been able to overwrite that programming.

Moments stick out in his mind. Times when he was forced to consciously think, _I'm going to be in trouble if anyone finds out._

The man who propositioned Dean outside his and Sam's motel room when Dean was fifteen and Dad hadn't been back all weekend. He remembers the fear that Sam might have overheard, the irrational feeling that the guy wasn't just some sick creep who would have said that to any boy, but that he could look at Dean and tell there was something different about him. 

His seventeenth birthday, when Dad sent him out to a haunted chapel with a bag of rock salt and a can of lighter fluid, and the spirits of the women who'd chosen to die rather than be punished for loving one another writhed in their last embrace, begging God's mercy as they burned. He'd returned with ash in his hair, steel-jawed and puffing his chest out while his insides wailed, wondering if Dad could tell just by looking why he was reluctant to talk about the job.

The time a girl with a Bettie Page haircut took him home and told him he was pretty, but he'd look even prettier in her clothes. When he'd finally agreed to wear them, he'd said, "I'm not a queer."

She'd kissed his lips, leaving her lipstick behind, and said, "Obviously," and stroked him through the satin until he came with her seated on his face. She had a floor-length mirror in her bedroom, and lying there on his back with her slick still on his mouth, he saw himself and liked the way he looked, soft and spent and oddly delicate, and he'd thought, _She's wrong._

The first time he and his old friend Lee snuck away from his dad to go out drinking after a hunt. Lee had thrown his arm around Dean's back, a solid line of heat all along his side, and Dean, stumbling, had slapped a splayed hand against his thick chest and thought, _I could kiss him right now,_ but didn't. Dad liked Lee, respected him. He said he liked hunting with him, that he had a good head on his shoulders and a mean right hook, even though it pissed him the hell off when Lee, who was older than Dean and should've had his dumb early-twenties bullshit far behind him, brought him back half-senseless smelling like cigarette smoke and stale beer.

That was one of the reasons that Dean kept his damn mouth shut after the fifth or sixth time. Lee planted a wet, bristling kiss under his ear and helped him jerk the both of them off behind the building. He'd staggered back to the motel well into the early hours of the morning to find his dad asleep, but when he'd come out of the shower to climb into bed, he heard Dad's voice on the other side of the room, saying, "Don't want to see you coming home like that ever again, boy. You hear me?"

Dean had frozen, one knee on the mattress, afraid to look, though it was too dark to see his face. "Yes, sir."

"You can't afford that kind of distraction."

"No, sir."

"I don't give a shit Lee's a hunter. If I catch you after sneaking around in some shithole with him again, I'll black his eye. You come home by midnight. You stay home. That's part of the job."

"Yes, sir."

Dean had lain awake, not sure how much his dad knew, whether he just thought Dean was drunk and useless, or if it was worse than that, if he had figured out what had really gone on and knew he had to put an end to it. _If he hits Lee, what's he gonna do to me?_ Dean had wondered, and watched the ceiling, afraid to do so much as breathe too loud until the sun rose. But Dad never said, and Dean never brought Lee up again after the last time they did a job together, and that was that for the remainder of John Winchester's life.

Castiel had said something before about gender being irrelevant, a human hangup not worth bothering with or caring about. Where did that leave Dean, then? If Castiel could just throw it in the trash, what had Dean been spinning himself in circles for all these years? What had he been working so hard to hide it for? Dean definitely didn't care what God thought, and he told himself he didn't care what his dad thought anymore, either. So why should he still be so fucking _afraid?_

Alcohol dulls it for a while, but it always just comes right back again. And here he is, hiding in his room from his best friend, his very recently revived best friend, who he had thought he might never see again. He'd gone and fucked that up, too. So what did it matter? What did any of it matter? Cas is one of the few people in Dean's life that keeps coming back. Someone he'd die for, someone he'd kill for. Someone who, despite that, he still can't bring himself to touch where people might see. And unfortunately it's real easy to hate himself for that and then just keep on doing it.

Castiel seems just as set on avoiding him as he is on avoiding her, which works out, even though it also leaves him feeling like shit scraped off a boot. He eats breakfast with Jack and Sam, and Rowena glides in at noon every day acting like she ought to be waited on hand and foot while Sam makes a faint attempt at acting like he's not going to do exactly that, and he hardly catches a glimpse of Cas through it all, unless Dean happens to pass through while she's spending time with Jack. She's kept her hair in its braid, and his fingers itch at his sides when he sees it.

He tries to distract himself by cleaning. He hauls all the bottles and cans out of his room in two great big trash bags, and doesn't ask permission from Cas to steal her stolen truck to take them to the dump. He changes the sheets. Hell, he even dusts the furniture. But then he gets to his mom's room in his chaotic fervor to return the whole dusty bunker to some kind of external order, and he's faced with a dilemma.

Neither of them have opened this door since the day they brought Jack home. He's not sure if he should now. Maybe Rowena will heal up quick and they'll find a way to save her. All of her things will be just how she left them, and it could be a rare moment of perfect normalcy in her otherwise utterly abnormal life. Or maybe she'd want him to make sure her things are clean and fresh when she gets back. He argues with himself for a minute before he says screw it, and opens the door.

Honestly, he's not sure what he expected. The room hardly looks lived in. Mom had been gone more often that she was around, and the only evidence anyone lived here at all is a bottle of Tylenol on the side table, a half-empty water glass, and Mary's still-packed duffel bag by the door. Sam had put that there himself; they couldn't just leave it in the Impala, but she wasn't around to need it.

She'd treated the bunker like a hostel, coming and going and hardly leaving a trace she was ever there.

Dean grabs the bottle of pills and takes the glass away to wash it out.

What would Mom think of all this, if she were here? Would she even care, or would she just treat it like another bad dream she could get away from if she just took one more job?

There's an idea. Dean inherited all his parents' worst traits, so why not just lean into it?

He's still doing the dishes when Sam walks in. He opens the fridge, hovering with the door ajar for a long enough time that Dean suspects he's not actually looking at anything. Dean keeps his nose down, rinsing out bowls and setting them on the drying rack one after the other.

"Hey," Sam says after a while, Mr. Smooth.

"Sammy," Dean says, and starts wiping things down with a dishtowel. Sam closes the door, empty-handed, and slicks his hair back.

"Look, I know you're pretty mad about Rowena," Sam says, and Dean's so genuinely caught off guard that he laughs for the first time in days, a little snort and a huff. Honestly, he'd been so distracted by everything else, he forgot to be mad about that.

"I don't care about Rowena," Dean says. Sam looks like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop. "You were right about one thing, she might be the only person who can help us figure out how to get to Mom. So, you know. Whatever. You and I can handle it."

"Oh." Sam shuffles in place, thrown off-balance. "Well, uh… Good, then. That's good."

"Yep." Dean finishes drying the dishes, and starts putting them away in their places. Sam helps, and a small part of Dean thinks it's just so he can lord those few extra inches of height over him reaching the highest shelves.

"I really thought you were pissed at me. You've been, uh, kinda keeping to yourself."

"What, a guy can't value his 'me time'?"

"I don't know. It's just a little quiet, I guess. Cas has been gone, and all Jack and Rowena have been doing is binge-watching _Great British Bake Off_ , which is… fine and all, but—"

"What do you mean, Cas is gone?" That's news to Dean, who admittedly hasn't seen her in a few days, but he'd thought that was by his choice.

"He took off a couple days ago. He didn't tell you?" Sam frowns, pulling his phone out of his pocket, scrolling through. "He texted this morning. Didn't really explain what he was doing, but you know how Cas can be."

"Well, that's just fucking great," Dean says, slamming a cabinet shut. Sam flinches, then slips his phone back in his pocket.

"Is everything… you know—"

"It's fine. Whatever, like I'm his keeper?" Dean scrubs a hand over his chin. He forgot to shave again, and his scruff is nearing beard territory. "Yeah," he growls, "I just fucking died, but sure, I'll run off alone to do who knows what without saying anything."

"Did you guys have another fight?" Sam's using the same voice he uses to talk to scared animals and little kids, which is about the limit of what Dean can handle from this conversation. Dean pulls out his phone, tries to ignore that his most recent recieved text is that photo of Jack grinning and Cas making that dumb little frowny face, and starts typing something to Cas before he can think better of it.

**Where are you??**

"Dean?" Dean looks up from his phone, then shoves it back in his pocket, cheeks hot.

"Idiot. I can't believe her. Screw this."

"Dean, _what_ is going on?" Dean just blusters past him, heading for the garage. "Where are you going?"

"Out." Dean needs to just drive until he stops fuming, and then maybe drive some more.

"Right, go throw a tantrum about it if that's what you need to do, then!" Sam calls out after him, but Dean's already halfway to the garage.

He drives straight down the highway until he's got to flip over the cassette in the deck, but when side B of _Physical Graffiti_ plays the opening notes of "In the Light" he just ejects it again, pulling off onto the shoulder and sitting in the idling car in silence. He pulls his phone out for the first time since he started driving. To his surprise, he's got a missed message from Cas.

It takes a second to load when he opens it. It's a picture of a deer, its nose pointed up into a blackberry bush. The light is golden and just starting to fade, casting the rest of the image in blues. Dean looks outside, squinting against the early evening sun. So they're in the same time zone, at least. He fires off a response.

**You skipped town to go on a nature hike without saying anything?**

Dean furiously watches the little "..." of Cas responding blink like staring at it will make Cas appear in front of him, like old times.

**I'm sorry. I didn't think you wanted to see me.**

Dean sighs, letting his head tilt forward until it collides with the steering wheel, pressing a hard line into his forehead. He has no idea what the fuck to say to that, because Cas is right— he had been purposefully avoiding her. That doesn't mean he wants to her fuck off and vanish on him. His phone blips before he can figure out an answer.

**How is Jack?**

Dean reflexively starts to type a reply about watching too much Netflix, then stops, gritting his teeth, deleting everything, and replacing it with:

**Ask him yourself**

He stares at the screen for a long while, tapping the screen every time it dims, but Cas doesn't text him again. He throws the phone into the passenger's seat and steps off the brake, pulling a U-turn and heading for the closest pocket of civilization.

A night spent being alone around other people might do him right. If he gets too drunk, he'll just pick someone up and let her take him home. He's found a place to sleep that way more than once. So what if it's been at least ten years since he had to worry about things like that? It's like so many other things in his life, at this point. Instinct.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on the progress I'm making in the fic, I've set the number of chapters at 7. Might grow down the line depending on how it shakes out, but I think that's where it's gonna land! Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. <3
> 
> * * *

There's a musty smell, the air thick with dust and humidity. Everything feels thick. Dean's tongue is thick in his mouth, and his clothes stick to his back, his skin tacky with sweat and grime.

There's a table in the center of the room, a knife with an ugly edge and a handle carved from antler jutting from the wood. Beside him is a man, threadbare clothes and careworn features. He holds Dean's hand, long, blunt fingers woven into his. His hair curls around his ears with rough-shorn edges, his beard in need of trimming. He releases Dean, walks over to the table, and, with some effort, tugs the knife from the wood. He looks up, a dreamy smile on his lips. His eyes are dark, wide pupils rimmed with blue.

Castiel, human, beckons him closer.

Dean goes. He goes until he's close enough to smell Castiel, the liquor on his breath, woodsmoke and stale sweat. Water is a precious resource, bathing a luxury, but after a few years of that, you get accustomed to the smell of unwashed bodies. Castiel takes his hand again, peels his fingers apart, and folds the handle of the knife into them, then cradles Dean's fist like it's precious.

"Dean," Castiel says, like there's nothing that brings him more joy. Just saying his name. He holds Dean's hand, knife pointed down at their feet, against his sternum, stepping close enough to share breath. Castiel's lips are dry and chapped, parted open on a sigh. "Dean."

Dean lowers the knife between them. Cas steps even closer, into the circle of Dean's arms. His temple nudges Dean's cheek, his beard scratching Dean's chin.

"Dean, please," Cas begs. "Please."

"I can't," Dean croaks.

"Yes you can. You can. I want you to." Castiel's nose nudges his. He breathes out. Dean breathes in.

At his side, Dean's arm moves. The knife arcs. Castiel's hands snake up Dean's chest, weaving around his neck, pulling them flush. Castiel's lips crack and bleed under Dean's, copper and rot.

The blade pierces skin. Hot blood blooms through Castiel's gauzy shirt, over Dean's clenched knuckles, from the incision point. Right past the ribs, just under the arm. Cas convulses against him, groans into Dean's open mouth.

"You can have it. It's okay," Cas murmurs.

 _Bang._ A sound splits the close air, drowning out the sound of Castiel's labored breathing in his ear. _Bang._

The knife falls from Dean's hand. He slides slick fingers over the wound. They slip inside easily. Castiel gasps.

_Bang._

"Yes."

_Bang._

"Dean, please."

_Bang._

"Dean—"

—

Something is pounding on the door. Dean recoils from the sound, cowering. Irrational little-kid fear surges through him, and he wipes at his eyes with the backs of his hands, holding his arms over his head. A second later, it occurs to him that he has a gun, that he needs to get his gun _now_ —but he gropes under his pillow to find that it's gone. He lurches out of bed, regretting it immediately when his head throbs with pain.

"Dean? Dean, are you there?"

He doesn't recognize the voice right away. He scans the room through a squint. It's a motel, like hundreds of others he's slept in. His pants are on the floor, his shirt draped over the AC unit. He can't tell what time it is by the light through the crooked blinds.

The door explodes open. The sound is unbearable, the light flooding in even worse. It stays intact, but the doorframe creaks and splits with the force. Castiel bursts through the doorway, eyes glowing blue with holy furor.

"What the _fuck_ ," Dean yelps, and his voice comes out raw and choked.

"Dean," Cas says, and rushes to the bedside. "Are you all right?"

Dean holds his hand in front of his eyes, wincing away from her. His head shakes, not as an answer, but as a question. The motion makes him heave, his stomach turning. Cas sits, grasping his head in her hands, and cooling energy melts into his temples, rushing over and through him, like drinking a cold glass of water. He instantly feels better, more clear-headed. He's also pissed. He yanks himself away, her hands falling from his face.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"You told me to come back."

Dean gapes. "Yeah, to the bunker. Not— here." Wherever here is. Now that he's apparently cured of his hangover, he's starting to remember stumbling down the road towards this motel from the bar. He winces, realizing he left the car in the other parking lot. That's probably where his gun is now.

"Sam said you disappeared, and that you weren't responding to his calls."

Dean pushes past Cas to grab his pants off the floor, fishing his phone out of the pocket. There are seven missed calls, and twice as many texts. He turns off the screen, running his fingers over his face.

"I was just at a bar. I didn't want to drive drunk. Cause I'm fucking _responsible_ ," Dean adds petulantly.

"Responsible?" Now that Dean can stand to look at Cas without it hurting, he can see she's furious. "This is what you call responsible? Drinking yourself half to death every night while your family worries about you?"

"I don't need a lecture from you." Dean yanks his pants on, then goes for his shirt, shaking it out and shimmying into it. "You disappeared first."

"That's not how I remember it," Cas says. "I knew you were lying, when you said the problem was solved, but— Dean, it's just getting worse."

"I can handle it myself just fine."

"Clearly you can't! So why won't you let anyone help you?"

"Help me? How are you gonna help me?" Dean sits on the edge of the bed to yank his boots on, tying the laces with enough strength to hurt his feet. "You can zap me all you want, you can't fix this shit," he says, and gestures to his head, to the swirling buzz inside it.

"I know that. I know I can't. Should I just stand by and watch you kill yourself again? I can't do that either."

Dean looks up at her. Her shoulders are set, her face glowing with frustration and helplessness. How many times has Cas watched him die? How many times has he done the same? Part of him wants to reach out, to admit that he can't do this anymore, that he's so tired of this endless cycle of loss and sacrifice. The other part knows that the common denominator is him. That everyone he cares about gets hurt, because that's all there is to him. Weapons aren't made to heal.

"How did you even find me?" All the fury has dulled into resignation. He's gonna get it from Sam, too, when he goes back home, and that's an exhausting thought.

"Just because I lost my wings doesn't mean I can't feel you." Cas sits on the bed next to him and places a hand on his shoulder. She's speaking softly, but there's still a thread of anger in her voice and in her grip. "I hear you, calling out to me. I will _always_ find you, Dean."

Dean's chest aches, remembering a future that never came to pass. A flightless angel who willingly followed him to the literal end of the earth, to his own death.

But he also remembers nightly prayers, and searching desperately through a hundred bloody fights just to find a man who didn't want to be found. Castiel can always find him, but when Cas wants to disappear, what has Dean ever been able to do about it?

He stands, shrugging on his jacket in the ruined doorway. Someone's going to be mad about that when they see it, and Dean doesn't want to be around for that.

"I'm going home," Dean says, his voice ruined by drink and poor sleep. "I'll tell Sam I'm not dead." 

Cas doesn't stop him. He texts Sam as he walks up the road.

**Call off the search party**

He hears the blip of Sam responding, but he doesn't look at his phone again until he's back at the bunker. Sam's waiting for him in the garage, looking like a disappointed parent, which is really a hilarious role-reversal for the two of them.

"You already know what I'm gonna say, right?"

"Yeah, so why don't we skip it," Dean says, slamming the car door shut. "Cas already Hulked out on me."

Sam huffs, his head nodding while he works up towards whatever he wants to say. "Okay, well, how about this — You're acting exactly like Dad right now."

"That supposed to hurt my feelings?"

"You really don't have a problem with that? You're just gonna give up? You wanna be a drunk who just peaces out when things get too hard?"

"It's in our blood, Sammy," Dean says, stalking out the door and down the hall. "It's what we're good at!"

"No, fuck you, Dean," Sam says, and spins him around with a hand on his shoulder. Dean throws a fist up, ready to defend against a punch, but Sam throws an arm around him, pulling him into a violent hug, trapping Dean's arm between them. "Fuck you. You're all I've got right now, don't fucking do this again."

Dean shoves against him, but Sam just holds him tighter. Tears prick at Dean's eyes.

"I don't know what's going on with you. But we don't have to talk about it right now. I'm just asking you to stick around. Just be here. Can you please just do that? For a little while?" Sam's voice resonates in his chest. Dean gets him to let go long enough that he can wipe at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He gives one curt nod. Sam breathes out haltingly.

"Okay, good. Cause we've got Lucifer's son and an evil witch living in our house, and they're eating all our olives. I can't deal with that by myself," he says with a wet laugh.

That startles Dean into a weak smile. More than anything, he's just relieved Sam is giving him an out not to explain himself, because he doesn't know that he could if he tried. It's all such a stupid, tangled mess in his head.

The rest of the day is quiet. There's a tension at the edge of everything he and Sam do, like if they stop acting like it's okay for a second, it's going to shatter the illusion. It'll come up again, Dean knows it has to, but neither of them want it to right now, so they're in a holding pattern. Cas hasn't come home yet, but Dean can guess from the way Sam keeps glancing at his phone and then nervously back at Dean that she's keeping in touch. As long as one of them knows where she is, he guesses he'll have to let that go, no matter how much it makes him want to hit something.

Rowena is starting to look better, now that Dean's actually paying attention. She's taken to sitting in one of the leather chairs in the library while Sam distracts himself with cataloguing everything on the shelves. Right now she's reading through one of the books with a mug of tea beside her. Her hair's grown out a bit more, and she's got enough energy to start looking like a gilded beetle again, her eyelids glittering with powder. She can get around more easily by herself, too, which is both good and bad, because now they really have to make sure they watch her around the books. Sam's started hiding the really dangerous stuff in the basement store room and keeping the door locked.

It's a week until Dean sees Castiel again. A week of Sam skirting around him like Dean used to skirt around their dad, a week of Jack asking him if Castiel will be back soon like Sam used to ask Dean about their dad, and a week of Dean looking at his tired, bearded face in the mirror every morning and seeing his fucking dad staring back at him. Sam took after their dad more in looks, whereas Dean always favored Mary, but it's impossible not to see the resemblance with dark circles under his eyes, sweating because he's trying to dry out even though all he wants is another drink.

So yeah, after a week of that, Cas steps into the library, and Dean looks up from the laptop, where he's been skimming the news for jobs, and does a double-take.

"Hey," he says eloquently. "Uh, you cut your hair."

"I did." Her hair is a mess. It's been shorn up to the nape of her neck, the ends uneven and choppy. At this length, it's started to curl into an uncontrollable mop.

"Okay. Cool." Dean closes the laptop and turns the chair a little to face her. "Where you been?"

"Around." Cas approaches the table, placing a hand on the surface on front of him. Her jaw is set in a challenge. Right, Dean almost definitely deserves that. She looks at him defiantly for a minute before she seems to grow awkward, looking down and around at the rest of the room instead of meeting his eyes. "How have you been?"

"Oh, you know. Babysitting. Getting babysat. Tit for tat." Dean gestures at her hair. "You, uh, you do that with a machete or something?"

Cas frowns at him. "No. I used scissors."

"Right. You want any help with—"

"No," Cas says, and takes a step away. Dean's stomach sinks. Right, of course, he should have known better. He'd be surprised if Cas ever let him close again after the way he's been acting.

"Jack's been asking after you," Dean says, redirecting the attention from his failures.

That sobers Castiel's demeanor a little. "Is he all right?"

"Yeah, sure, he's fine. Him and Rowena are practically best friends. He knows more about _Star Wars_ than I do, now. Pretty sure he just misses his… you know, his dad."

Dean regrets saying it, because Cas looks as heartbroken as he's ever seen her to hear it. She turns around, cradling her elbows, her fingers digging into the sleeves of her coat.

"I should have explained myself to him."

"What would you even say? 'Mommy and daddy aren't fighting, they're having a discussion'?" Dean scrubs at his cheeks, feeling them heat.

"It's not… it's not that," Cas says. "It's just hard to face him when I look like… this." She throws her hands up, a helpless little motion, and her shoulders sink when her hands fall. Dean stands up, circling around to see her face.

"What does that mean?"

"It's means I've been avoiding him, just as much as—" She looks up, then away, lips thinning. "Whenever I remember that I'm in this body, I feel so much _guilt_. Like… like I haven't earned the right to be his father."

"What, just because you look like a girl, he stops being your kid?"

"No, Dean, that's not—" Cas huffs, frustrated. "You don't understand."

"Enlighten me, then."

"I took this vessel only once, for eight hours, one hundred years ago. Do you know what I did in those eight hours?"

Realization creeps in, cold and sharp. Cas looks up at him, face drawn, and trembles.

"I sentenced an angel to death and stood by while my brother murdered an innocent child."

"Lily Sunder's daughter," Dean says. Castiel's head drops between her shoulders, and, despondent, she stares down at her splayed hands.

"All I see when I look at myself in this form is the hypocrisy, that I could call myself Jack's father, knowing the unforgivable things I might have done to him if everything had gone differently. If I had obeyed my orders, if I weren't _defective_ , if I hadn't..."

Dean wants to reach out, to touch her elbow, to make her look up at him. He doesn't dare. "Hadn't what?"

"Hadn't met you." Cas says it so simply, like it's the key to everything. Dean's heartbeat thuds in his ears.

"That's bullshit, man." Dean ducks his head, trying to catch her eyes, but she doesn't move. "We're the ones who wanted you to—" He looks up, glancing around the room to see if anyone's around to hear them. He speaks again, a little lower. "We told you to kill him."

"I know that. That doesn't change the reason I didn't."

"That had nothing to do with us either, that was all you and— you and Jack."

"No," Cas says, and when she looks up, her eyes are so sad it makes his chest hurt. "I spoke to Jack, I learned what he could be, and I loved him. And then I did what you taught me. I fought for him."

The question that's been eating at Dean for ages now rears back up, burning at the back of his throat. He opens his mouth, closes it again. He doesn't know how to ask something this big. There's so much more to it than just the words: _Did you mean what you said?_

"Cas? You're back?" Sam's walking in from the hall. Dean sucks in a breath, stepping away and running a hand back through his hair. Fuck. He doesn't know if he should feel relieved or not. Jack's not far behind him, and Dean can see the way Cas reacts a little nervously, now that he's looking for it. He hadn't noticed until now.

"Yes," she says. "Sorry to worry you."

Jack comes forward to pull her into a hug, guilelessly happy. Cas hesitates before her arms come to rest on his shoulders. She presses a kiss to the crown of his head. Dean aches, remembering how his mom used to do the same thing, when he was still little, and new enough to be loved unconditionally.

"Oh! What a scene," coos Rowena from the entryway. She's leaning against the wall like it's alluring and not genuinely because she needs help standing up. "You are all just… nauseating."

Sam signs to Jack, mouthing the word "jealous" with his back turned to Rowena. Jack gives him a goofy smile.

"Did you lose a fight with a lawn mower, Castiel, my love?" Rowena asks. Castiel frowns at her in a way that says she's genuinely insulted. Rowena sighs and rolls her painted eyes. "Come with me, I can't stand looking at you like this. It's a tragedy that demands redress." When Cas doesn't go immediately, she raps her cane against the floor. "Now?"

To Dean's surprise, after a brief hesitation, Cas goes, following Rowena down the hallway to the bathroom.

Sam's eyes trail them as they leave the room. "I don't know if I should go over there to rescue him or not."

"Rowena kinda had a point, though."

"She really did," Sam says with a grimace. He gives Dean a measuring look. "Hey, um."

Dean expects him to ask, "You okay?" or "What happened with you guys?" or something like that. Instead, Sam says, "We're out of milk. Me and Jack were gonna take the car, do a grocery run. If you're okay with that."

Groceries are usually Dean's job. Not exclusively, but that just usually seems to end up being Dean's chore when they're back at home base, same as he's usually the one driving, nine times out of ten. But Sam's still giving him that funny look that tells Dean what's really going on. Dean doesn't think of himself as being especially smart, but he was raised by John Winchester, and he remembers what it was like to try to manage his drinking without letting him realize he was being managed.

"Yeah," Dean says, shoving his hands in his pockets and studying the scuffs in the floor. "Yeah, go on ahead."

Sam looks relieved, either at the idea that Dean hasn't caught on, or that Dean's cooperating. "All right, we'll be back in a little while. Don't, uh—" Sam laughs uneasily. "Don't let Rowena turn Cas into an underwear model or anything. I don't think either of us would be able to cope with that."

"I'd think Pyramid Collection is more Rowena's style than Victoria's Secret," Dean says, putting on a smile for Sam's benefit. As he and Jack head towards the garage, Dean calls up, "Hey, you mind picking me up something while you're out?"

Sam looks back at him over the railing. His forehead creases.

"Can of Cheez Whiz. Got a weird craving."

Sam visibly relaxes, then makes a disgusted face. "Really Dean? Spray cheese?"

"C'mon, you remember grilled cheese? You used to beg me to make that shit."

 _"'Grilled cheese,'"_ Sam says derisively. "Spray cheese on saltines that we stuck in the microwave."

"It was your favorite!"

"It was nothing but oil, salt, and preservatives."

"And Jack's never had it before, so since we're showing him the world, I'm getting started on the classics. You want spray cheese, Jack?"

Jack looks back and forth between them helplessly. "Yes?"

Sam grabs Jack by the shoulder and guides him out. "We're going, before Dean decides he wants you to try Ding Dongs."

"Ding Dongs would be _great,"_ Dean shouts as they disappear from view.

So. That's how it is now.

Dean wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, striding down the hall to make sure Rowena hasn't gobbled up Cas's grace or anything like that.

What she's actually done is taken a normal pair of scissors and taken them to Castiel's head like it's a topiary. She has Cas sitting on the edge of the bathtub, a towel wrapped around her shoulders and her coat and blazer draped over a towel rack, and there are clippings of dark hair littered all around her. Rowena frowns at Castiel like she's a particularly vexing passage in a book whose language Rowena cannot read.

"I gotta pair of clippers," Dean says. "Would that work better?"

Rowena sighs. "I suppose. I imagine it'll end up rather butch, but perhaps you'd prefer that," she says to Cas, who shrugs.

"I don't think it's worth bothering with."

"Well, maybe this isn't your body forever, Castiel, but it is your body _now_ , so for the time being, it might be all right to settle in and make yourself at home, wouldn't you say?"

Cas looks up at that, brow furrowed, eyes round. She stares at Rowena thoughtfully. Rowena picks up a hand mirror from the edge of the tub and holds it in front of Castiel's face.

"Now, would you like it shorter?"

"I… yes."

"There, was that so hard?" Rowena sets the mirror and the scissors down. "All right, bring the blasted device over and see what you can do with this."

Dean swallows a surge of panic. "Oh, uh— I, maybe it's better if you do it."

"I've never used them before. You have. What's the issue?" She looks between the two of them impatiently. "Trouble in paradise again?"

Dean scrubs a hand over his face, ignoring her. "Look, Cas, you don't have to—"

"It's okay," she says, studying her hands in her lap. "I want you to."

Dean stops short. For some reason, the phrase makes him break out in a sweat, his stomach turning.

"You're sure?"

"Yes." Castiel looks up, full of quiet resolve. Like Dean can say no to that.

"Okay. I'll go get 'em."

Dean's been cutting his own hair for, shit, more than twenty years now, and he cut Sammy's, too, when they were kids. He cut his dad's hair a few times, when John let him. This… feels different.

The clippers buzz in Dean's hand, loud against the tile.

"Sit still, okay?"

"All right."

Dean places a hand on her shoulder to keep everything steady, but Castiel follows his directions, holding utterly still while he skims the heel of the clippers over her neck, letting the blades shear it down to centimeters of length and tapering up to the longer hair on top of her head. When he's got that even enough, he shortens the length of the blade enough to clean up around her hairline, her sideburns, and around the backs of her ears. Cas keeps her eyes closed, even when Dean clicks the clippers off and dusts off her neck with a towel. All said, it only takes about ten or fifteen minutes, but Dean feels every second of it.

"Okay, that's it."

When Cas opens her eyes again, Dean's heart stops for a second. _There he is._

"Not bad," Rowena says mildly. Dean almost jumps. He'd sort of forgotten she was there. She comes over to show Castiel the mirror again. "Well?"

"Oh," says Castiel, cheeks pink. And, yeah, that's about where Dean's at, too. _Oh._ "It's… good. Thank you." Cas shrugs out of the towel, then flicks his hands. In a blink, all the hair clippings have vanished.

"Perfect," says Rowena. "That's much better. And you'll remember this next time I need a little help with my Enochian, yes?"

"Of course," Cas says. When he turns to Dean, Dean busies himself with packing the clippers away.

"Looks good, Cas," he says. "Suits you."

"Thank you, Dean."

Dean doesn't look back up, clearing his throat. "All right, well. I'm gonna be in the garage if you need me. Baby needs a tune-up." He neglects to mention he's given the car more tune-ups in the last month than he had in the previous three put together.

Things stay quiet for a while after that. Now that Rowena's sleeping through less of the day, she and Sam start putting their heads together to figure out ways to access alternate dimensions. Dean helps them with that a little when he's got the brain for it, and when he's been at it for hours and can't stand it anymore, he gets up and makes coffee or lunch for the three of them.

Other days, Dean finds Rowena in the library with Cas, and the two of them go silent until he leaves again. He doesn't want to stick his nose in Castiel's business right now, he figures he owes him at least that much, but he's curious and more than a little bit worried about it all the same. He can guess what it is they intend to do, once Rowena's up to the task. He just wishes he could ask how Cas feels about it without upsetting things even more than he already has.

When he gets sick of listening to Sam and Rowena snipe at each other over cost versus benefit, he slips down the hallway to the TV room only to find it thoroughly occupied. Jack and Castiel have moved all the furniture to the far walls, and there's a dusty mat laid out in front of the television. Jack is in sweats, and Castiel has stripped down to just his shirt and slacks, and the both of them are bent over, asses in the air and hands flat on the ground. They're playing some kind of goofy-ass elevator music with ocean sounds layered over it.

"Uh… Having fun, guys?"

Jack's head peeks at him from between his knees, his hair sticking straight down from his head. "We're experiencing one-ness with our bodies!"

Dean's eyes go round. "Well. I don't need to stick around for _that_ talk."

"Jack has expressed some… difficulties in finding where he fits into things, into humanity, into a human body," Cas explains, lowering his knees until they touch the floor, then evening out his back. He slides down until he's flush to the floor. Dean tilts his chin up, focusing on the ceiling. "I admit, it's… not an unfamiliar struggle."

Jack, who has hopped back up from the little pretzel he'd contorted himself into, turns around. "I read on the internet that meditation and exercise can make people feel more 'centered'? Which is good, I think?"

"Yeah, all yoga ever really did for me was put a kink in my back." He scratches at the back of his neck. It's embarrassing, frankly. Like, he's not in bad shape. He did sports growing up. He kills monsters for a living. He's fucking fought the Devil. Why's "downward-facing dog" gotta be his achilles heel? Then he remembers Lisa and her sweet laughter at his terrible stance and the way he tipped over and knocked into a coffee table when he tried to do her routine with her, and he regrets saying anything in the first place. "You ever wanna learn a useful way to exercise, I'll show you how to _wrassle_."

"Wrassle?"

"Uh. Wrestling. I was on the wrestling team for a hot minute back when I was a little younger than—" Dean stops himself. "Okay, not actually younger than you, you're— You know what I mean. When I was like, sixteen. But you know, we get into fights a lot, and you can't always rely on a gun, or… crazy magic grace powers. Good to know how to handle yourself hand-to-hand."

"The intent was something... low-impact," Castiel says. "Non-violent."

"Oh." Dean nods slowly. "Right, sure. Non-violent. Got it."

"That isn't to say wrestling isn't a perfectly—"

"No, hey, I get it. It's cool. Stepping on your, you know, touchy-feely mindfulness session. I'll butt out."

"Dean," Cas says, like he's disappointed. Dean's face heats, and he grits his teeth, turning around to escape the way he came.

He ends up in the kitchen, and he's about to go into the cabinet when he remembers that if Sam catches him drinking alone at— what time is it— one in the afternoon, he might actually try to stage an intervention rather than just giving him worried looks every so often and leaving the keys to the Impala in hard-to-find places "accidentally," like there aren't any other cars Dean could take instead. So, okay. Trash that instinct. What else is there to drink. He opens the fridge. There is milk, there is almond milk, which Dean doesn't think should legally be allowed to be called milk and he's sure the cattle farmers of the good state of Kansas would agree with him, and there is seltzer.

Dean takes a bottle of seltzer. He hates seltzer, but maybe it will be distracting in how much it tastes like licking a drain pipe full of pop rocks.

Cas walks in when he's grimacing through his third sip, still dressed down to his shirt and slacks. He's not even wearing shoes, Dean notices now. He freezes mid-motion.

"Dean, you didn't let me finish speaking," Cas says, a little line of frustration between his eyebrows.

"I wasn't trying to be an asshole." Dean says, screwing the cap back into the bottle. He's not drinking that shit.

"You're _not_ an asshole," Cas says firmly.

Dean coughs out a humorless laugh. "I kinda am."

Cas rolls his eyes. "Okay, you're an asshole." That makes Dean laugh for real, because it's always at least a little funny when Castiel curses. "But you were trying to share something with Jack. Something that's important to you. Right?"

Dean looks down at Castiel's socked feet on the tile, because it's easier than looking him in the eye.

"And I sounded like I was shooting you down. So in this instance, I'm the one who's an asshole."

"No you're not," Dean scoffs.

"All right, so we can go around like this in circles, forever, or we can agree that either we're both assholes, or neither of us are, and say we're even."

"Gap-free logic, buddy," Dean says, embarrassed. "Can't argue with you, can I." When he drags his eyes back up, Castiel is studying him quietly. Dean feels uncomfortably split open, like Cas could just reach into his head and empty it of everything rattling around in there bit by bit, like a game of Operation.

"I think I'm beginning to understand it."

"What's that?"

"Wrestling. It was important to you. I know that. Something you were good at. Something your father didn't own."

Dean flinches at that. Okay, so he's _really_ getting dissected.

"But it's not…" Cas continues, pausing in frustration at the limitations of language. "...it isn't based in violence for you. Maybe it came out of that, but that's not what it's about."

Dean remembers being a desperate kid, thinking for the first time, _Wrestling, I could do that._ How many kids his age could say they already had a kill list? He had plenty of combat experience, so another kid would be a piece of cake to take down, compared to a ghoul or a werewolf. But of course, life-or-death fights don't call for much in the way of sportsmanship, so he was actually what you'd call _really fucking bad_ at wrestling at first.

It wasn't until he learned how to play by the rules, how to take someone down without really hurting them, that he started to win. And when it was over, some guys would shake his hand and say, "Good match, man," or, "You were awesome," and then it was like they were… y'know. Friends. No bodies to bury. No blood filling his mouth. And when he brought back a certificate with his name on it, there was someone there to tell him they were proud of him.

"Jesus, Cas," Dean says, blinking to keep from letting his eyes water. "Where's this all coming from?"

"I hurt you," Cas says. "I'm trying to understand how. I don't ever want to hurt you, Dean."

Dean frowns in confusion. " _You_ didn't hurt _me_ , Cas."

"But you're hurt." Cas takes a few steps forward. Dean's pinned in spot by the counter behind him. Cas keeps walking, until he's close enough that Dean can see the hard set of his smooth jaw, the faint lines by his mouth.

 _You don't deserve to get saddled with this,_ Dean thinks. Castiel's head moves like he's listening for a distant sound, like Dean's thoughts are just a whisper Castiel can pluck from the wind. Déjà vu hits him like a kick to the gut, takes him back to the moment, ten years ago, when an angel first looked into his eyes and casually unraveled him with the words, _You don't think you deserve to be saved._

Castiel takes a step closer.

"I don't need you to fix me," Dean says.

Cas stops, arms stiff at his sides. His eyes are bright and very still.

"You can't," Dean says. Castiel opens his mouth to speak. Dean barrels right past him. "You can't _fix_ me, and I wish everyone would stop fucking trying to. Everyone's always so careful, all the time, all this sneaking around. At least when I'm pissing you off you say what you're really thinking."

"I am not trying to _fix you_ ," Cas says, flushed with anger, "because you are not _broken_."

Dean wants to ask him. He can feel it, bubbling up again, the need to know. _What do you see when you look at me? What the hell is it about me that makes you want to stay? What would it take to get you to leave for good?_ They've crossed that threshold so many times, then crossed right back over it again.

Then Dean remembers— something Cas said a few days before.

"No— you are."

Cas flinches.

"You think you're the one who's broken," Dean says. "That's what you said before. You think you're 'defective.'"

A thought forms, cruel in its simplicity: _You think I'm the best you can do._

Something in Castiel's expression shutters. Dean waits for him to respond, but he doesn't. He just watches Dean, maybe imagining that Dean will think better of it and apologize, or say something to make it better. But that's not the kind of man Dean is. Better Cas finally realizes it, even if it is years too late. Dean's always going to disappoint him. That's what he does best.

He slides to the side to escape the closeness of their bodies. He doesn't look back.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Important note:** The rating has gone up and the tags have been updated accordingly. :) This chapter also got kind of long! oops! whoopsie! uh oh!
> 
>  **Second important note:** LOOK AT THIS LOOK AT THIS LOOK AT THIS
> 
>   
>    
> 
> 
> (prolonged screaming!!!!!!!) I'm so happy. Thank you, Z, for another incredible piece of art that I now get to gaze at lovingly. [Please direct comments re: its incredibleness to the artist!](https://destielamv.tumblr.com/post/641576234198941696/i-havent-drawn-with-pencil-in-like-a-month-and-i)
> 
> * * *

Dean knows he hit home when a day later, Sam knocks on his door to lean in and sheepishly tell him, "Cas is headed up to Sioux Falls."

Dean turns off his music and sets his headphones down on the bed. "All right. Everything okay up there?"

"Yeah, no problems. Jody and the girls are fine. Cas asked me to, uh, call them up, see if he could go visit with Claire." He runs a hand through his hair, sighing. "Jody's never spoken to Cas in person before, I don't think she was expecting to meet him like this, but now they know… you know, what to expect."

"Cool. Anything else?"

Sam hovers in the door, staring down at him. Dean studies the fraying sleeve of his shirt until he hears Sam huff impatiently.

"I guess not."

"Okay."

"He's leaving in an hour."

"Great."

Sam lets out another bitchy little huff, then closes the door again. Finally.

Dean puts his headphones back on, but he realizes after five minutes of staring at the backs of his hands, trying to breathe normally, that he forgot to press play again. He stays in his room for the rest of the night, and only comes out after midnight, when he's relatively sure Sam will be asleep.

He can make his way through the hall pretty easily in the dark, just from muscle memory. But the kitchen light is already on, and Jack is sitting inside. So. There goes one bright idea.

Jack looks up from the laptop he's gently frowning at. "Oh, you're up late," he says.

"Couldn't sleep," Dean says. Which is true, not that he was trying that hard. "You know, staring at that screen all day's gonna rot your brain."

"That's a myth," Jack says pleasantly.

" _Unicorns_ are a myth."

"Actually, they—"

"Okay, shatter all my illusions why don't you," Dean says. "They probably only talk to virgins anyway, right?" He takes a glass and fills it with water from the tap, sitting across from Jack at the kitchen table. "What're you up to?"

"I'm reading the news," Jack says.

"Looking for another case?"

Jack chews on his lip. Dean wonders where he picked that tic up from.

"Castiel said he wasn't sure how long he'd be gone. So, until he comes back, I need to find something I can do to help. I'm still not very good at… at making my powers do what I want them to. But I've learned it's actually… nice. To feel useful."

Dean swallows a pang of sympathy. He remembers his dad being gone, trying to do his drills like his dad taught him, trying to find something that would make his dad look at him for just a moment in a way that said he did a good job. For a second, Dean feels a flash of anger at Cas for leaving Jack behind with hardly any warning, but then he guiltily remembers that every single time, it's been Dean's fault. Hard to blame Cas for that.

"All right, hit me. Anything interesting?"

"Not really. A lot of articles about 'tweets'."

"Yeah, you'll wanna ignore those. Here, let me show you a couple of the places me and Sam hit up for leads."

Dean walks Jack through some of their go-to forums, pointing out which posts are claptrap and which ones have merit. He shows him how to corroborate eyewitness accounts with evidence from other sources, and he shows him how to dig into a poster's history to see if it's a reliable eyewitness.

"There's this shit called 'creepypasta'," Dean says. "Really made our job more difficult in the last few years. You'll wanna just ignore anything you see on Reddit right off. Just don't even bother."

"Oh," Jack says, disappointed. "I like looking at the cat pictures."

"Well... those are fine. Just not the ghost stories." Dean changes the subject before Jack decides to ask him which subreddits he looks at.

After that, Jack comes to him for things a lot more often. Not constantly, but Dean realizes now how often Jack had been holding himself back in Dean's presence, trying not to disturb the tenuous truce they'd settled into. A while ago, Dean might have thought: _Good. He should be careful around me._ Now, he's surprised to find he doesn't think of Jack as being Lucifer's son first. He's Castiel's. Another weird little person-shaped angel, or half-angel at least, looking at him like his word is gospel. Looking at it through that lens, he feels a tremendous pressure to get it right this time.

Underneath that is a quieter want: to do something that Cas would be proud of him for, to protect something that's important to him. To care, because Cas cares.

When he fruitlessly tries to sleep without any medicinal intervention, staring at his phone, trying not to call Castiel, or text him, or hell, even pray to him, he thinks about how wrong he's already gotten it and wonders what the point is in trying. But then he'll demonstrate something trivial that Jack's never done before in his short life, like how to change the oil in a car, or how to tell if someone's cheating you at cards, or even something stupid like how to play rock paper scissors, and Jack's whole face lights up with an uncomplicated delight that belies the violence of his conception, and Dean… well, he's learning to take that for the gift it is.

Dean's seen his whole past lain out by the divine powers manipulating his narrative, all the wars fought to bring him into existence. The dirty deals and the deceit necessary for Sam to have been born. But he knows, he _knows_ Sam was born good, that Sam tries, every day, to do good. It's a comfort to think that neither of them were born violent. And hey. Maybe the same goes for Jack.

Sam gives him an update on Cas with an impatient set to his mouth. Reportedly, Jody says he's not what she expected from an angel, which, fair. Claire left town the day before to take care of a nest of ghouls, and Cas tagged along with her. So the two of them are buddy-buddy enough to go on hunting trips together, which is not what Dean would have expected, either, but all right.

"Tell Cas to check in when they're done, make sure everything's okay."

"Claire's been hunting on her own a while now," Sam says with a weird look. "She and Jody have their own system."

"Yeah, I know that, but—" Sam keeps looking at Dean oddly, until Dean's ears go hot. "Man, shut up."

"If you're that worried about them, why don't you talk to Cas yourself? Or hell, if you're still intent on being a middle-schooler about it, just send Claire a message. _She's_ not pissed at you."

Dean's eyes narrow. Sam holds his hands up in surrender, turning on his heel and walking out before Dean can argue with him.

He tries that night. Opens his phone and pulls up Claire's number. Stares at the screen for a while, trying to think of something to say that isn't completely mortifying, before he tosses the phone across the bed, where it slides off the blankets and lands on the floor with a clatter. Dean curses, scrambling over to inspect it, but the screen's not broken. Which is good, because the amount of fights he gets into, he's broken a lot of phones, and it's a real pain in the ass.

He rolls over onto his back, staring at the ceiling. He should go out too. Find some heads to bust, or something. He can't sleep for shit the last couple weeks, and he's spinning around pointlessly like a hamster in a wheel here at the bunker. He flips through his graciously unbroken phone, skimming over articles and forum posts, trying to fend off the tension headache starting behind his eyes and giving up when keeping them open is more trouble than it's worth.

When all else fails, jerking off usually helps him sleep, and it's a luxury he's indulged in often since they found the bunker and Dean gained near-boundless access to privacy for the first time in his life. He eyes the stack of magazines on the dresser without actually getting up to look at one, too unfocused to make the effort. He eyes his phone again, considering the options there, but he knows there'd be some needling little urge in the back of his mind to look at his contacts or his messages again, so he nixes that idea too.

"Keep it simple, stupid," he mutters to himself, palming himself through his jeans, not trying to accomplish anything but feeling the warmth. He stares at the cracks on the ceiling. He doesn't even have to look at his stash to summon a visual. That's a place to start. Simple, uncomplicated appreciation of breasts is something he considers key to his character. And the last time he saw a really nice pair was...

A month ago, Castiel shucking out of a white chemise.

His hand stills. A moment later, he groans, holding his head in his hands, elbows in the air. Of course. He's cursed now. He's not even allowed the relative safety of thinking about tits to get him through the night.

He gets up, goes to the sink, and aggressively splashes water on his face until his sleeves are unpleasantly damp. He grabs two aspirin, swallowing the pills and chasing them with the remaining contents of the flask he'd successfully managed to avoid touching until now. It's not much, but it's gotta be enough, because Dean's on track to just start banging his head against the mirror until he knocks himself out.

He strips out of his clothes, shutting out the lights and dragging the blankets over himself with furious finality. He lies still, in the dark, trying to breathe evenly until his body is dragged forcibly into sleep. Either ten minutes or an hour of concerted effort later, he huffs, rolling over to snatch his phone up from the bedside table.

There's about a hundred things he wants to say to Castiel. He could pick one. He could just spin the big wheel until it lands on something, and he could say, "I'm sorry," or, "I fucked up," or, "Are you okay?" He could tell Cas he just wants things to be the way they never really got a chance to enjoy. Him and Cas sitting on the edge of a motel bed watching _The Mask of Zorro_ on a battered old TV. Dean sitting shotgun in the Continental and hearing the mixtape he made for Cas coming out of the speakers, watching Cas mouth along with his favorite lyrics. Castiel, who saw the birth of life on this planet, who watched the stars and the planets formed from nothing, who has lived through more lifetimes than Dean's mind can comprehend, content to sit with him in a greasy diner, knocking knees with him under the table while Dean eats and debating whether he ought to spend a quarter on Dusty Springfield or Elvis.

Dean could say that he wants to kiss him again, the way Cas deserves to be kissed. The way Dean wishes he could, if he could just peel back all the layers of scar tissue he's built up over the years. No hard edges, no looming threat. Just Dean's hands sliding through his hair, making the coarse ends of it bristle and stick out in that way that makes him look perpetually post-nap, until Cas sighs and leans into him like a cat.

He could say, "You're wrong." That something is broken in him, has been broken so long he can't trace it back to when it happened. That Cas fixed his body, but the soul he stuffed in it was cracked, and always had been.

He could say, "Come home."

His fingers move on the screen.

**Tell Claire I said hey**

After a few minutes, the message is marked as read. Dean waits for a response until his eyelids droop. He's still waiting when he drifts into sleep.

—

Dean cracks an egg into the pan. The shell splits, parts almost evenly into halves, allowing its contents to slide into the oil to pop and crackle and set in the heat. Wet eggwhite trails behind and sticks to his thumb. Dean tosses the shell into the compost jar, and runs his hand under the faucet.

The light is cool and dim through the window in the little galley kitchen. The wind tousles his hair as it blows through the screen. It's in need of patching, but it's not important.

Dean slides one sunny side up egg onto a slice of buttered toast, a perfectly round yellow yolk in a cloud of white.

There's a stirring, from deeper inside the little house where Dean lives. The floorboards creak here, sometimes. In the winter, there's little to insulate him from the cold, and he piles rugs, one on top of the other, to stop the chill creeping in. Summers are soft and breezy, though, and when it's too warm, Dean can walk to the beach and dive into the water. At night, he can see the ends of the coast curling around the ocean like an outstretched hand.

Castiel emerges, golden and formless. He fills the air around him with bright and shifting light.

"Good morning, sunshine," Dean says. He lifts the slice of toast to his mouth and bites. Savory yolk spills over his lip and down his chin, clinging there. His tongue darts out to swipe it away.

Castiel speaks. His voice is the white noise at the end of a cassette tape, the echo of your ear pressed to a seashell, the sound of the ocean through their bedroom window at night. His many wings don't fit in the doorway of the kitchen, and Dean tells him so with a crumb-flecked smile. He sets the plate down on the counter, meeting Castiel in the doorway. He shouldn't be able to fit in this house at all, but his power has dwindled somewhat over the years. That's fine with Dean.

Two of Castiel's great wings part, revealing his face. He is beautiful, eyes sky blue and cloaked in flame. Dean leans into him, and two more wings close around him. Fire races through his nerves, too much and not enough. In his ear, Castiel's voice is fire, cracking wood and fluttering heat. A tongue of fire licks out across Dean's bristled chin. Despite the warmth, Dean shivers.

"Woe is me," whispers Dean, "for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips."

Castiel curls around him more tightly, until Dean can see nothing but the glow of his great body. Castiel bends to him, bird-necked and sharp, and kisses him. His lips are hot coals, and Dean burns with them.

Into his mouth, Castiel breathes smoke. Dean inhales. Castiel's ringing voice melts into owlsong. "Behold, this has touched your lips; Your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged."

Dean gasps.

—

Dean gasps.

He lies awake in his bedroom, holding his palms downward at his sides, flat against the bed. He's hard against his stomach. He swallows, his throat dry and sticking. His eyes adjust to the darkness moment by moment.

He looks at his phone. Somehow, it migrated, half under his shoulder and half under his pillow. He shifts, reaching for it, hissing at the friction it causes.

No messages.

"Fuck," he mutters emphatically. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck."_

It's not even 5 AM yet. Dean throws himself out of bed and into his robe, rushing his way through a cold shower that leaves his teeth chattering. What the fuck. What the _fuck_.

Dean slaps himself once, following the slap with another shake of the towel across his wet hair.

His heart hasn't stopped pounding since he woke up. He doesn't know how to stop it. Coffee certainly won't help, but he can't think of what else to do to bring himself back to reality, so he starts a pot, pacing in the kitchen while the little machine gurgles and spits.

This is the kind of shit that gets his subconscious off now. Formless balls of flame, as long as they're named Castiel. Without trying to, he can still feel the sear of his kiss. He leans against the refrigerator, his forehead thunking against the cold metal.

"Dean?"

Dean whirls around, heart in his throat. Sam is in the doorway, still in pajamas and with bed-rumpled hair, squinting like he's only partly awake.

"I thought I heard you banging around in here. What's going on?"

"Nothing," Dean says too fast. "Coffee. Sorry, wasn't tryna be loud."

"Okay," Sam says, unconvinced. He looks at the coffee pot, still chugging away, then back at Dean. "All right. So."

Dean sucks in a sharp breath, turning on his heel with a grimace, because of course Sam's going to choose _now_ to finally ambush him.

"Dean, don't act like that, okay? You gotta talk to me, man."

"I don't _gotta_ do anything."

"Okay, then you'll just keep doing this. Whatever this is," Sam says, gesturing at the two of them, awake before dawn, talking in circles in the kitchen. "Until Cas finally leaves for good. Cause that's working out so great for you."

Dean makes a fist, counting to five.

"I don't know what you did, but…"

"What _I_ did?" Dean whirls on him, anger surging in his blood. "You think this is all on me?"

"I don't know if it is or not, Dean, because you won't fucking talk about it!" Sam stops himself, realizing he's nearly shouting, and lowers his voice significantly, though his face is still twisted with desperate confusion. "You won't talk to me, and Cas is my friend too, and I'm just trying to figure out what's going on."

Dean's throat seals itself around the words. His face heats. "I…"

"Did you try something with him?"

"Sammy, if you want me to explain this to you so bad, you're gonna have to shut the hell up while I do it," Dean says. The coffee pot dings. Dean breathes in, then out, then goes to get two mugs, filling them with coffee and setting them both down on the table. He gestures for Sam to sit down. He does so, his mouth a straight, unhappy line. Dean sits across from him, staring into the mug, like if he looks hard enough it'll untangle the mess in his head.

"Cas and I sort of. We." Dean clears his throat, covering his face with his hand. "Jesus Christ."

"Did you—"

"I kissed Cas," Dean blurts out. "Cas said— but I'm the one who— Whatever, that happened."

"Okay." Sam breathes out, raising the mug to his mouth and taking a small sip, testing the temperature. "All right, so I'm trying— I'm trying to find a way to say this that isn't accusatory. Because I'm not trying to come out on the attack, and I am trying to see this from your perspective, Dean."

"Attack me, if that's what you wanna do," Dean says.

"No, I am _trying_ not to attack you, because I am trying to understand what was going through your head that you decided because— because Cas came back in a woman's— because his body was different, because he looked different, that it's okay for you to just come on to him all the sudden. I don't know if you noticed, man, but Cas really cares about you. Like, he really _loves_ you, and you can't just play fast and loose with his feelings because he looks like—"

"Sam, I'm serious, shut up. Stop talking." The smell of the coffee makes his stomach turn, and he bats the mug aside, letting it slide towards the other end of the table. Sam, to his credit, shuts up, setting his mug in front of him and holding it in two broad, white-knuckled hands. Dean massages his temples. All the heat of his anger has leeched from him, leaving cold dread in its wake. His toes are cold, and he curls them up under his feet, staring sightlessly at the scuff marks in the wood of the tabletop.

"Cas," Dean starts again, worrying at the dry skin on his lower lip with his teeth. "Cas would not be the first guy I've…" His head bobs. He's hoping Sam's smart enough to put the rest together himself. He hears the way Sam's breathing changes when it connects in his head.

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"I didn't. I didn't know."

Dean swallows, a hard knot twisting in his gut. Sam's already looking at him like he's trying to puzzle him back together from entirely new pieces. It's not rejection, but Dean can't stand it, and he has to look away.

"Dean, why didn't you ever say something?" When he glances back up, Sam's looking at him with big, sad I'm A Sensitive Guy eyes, and Dean wants to jump in the car and drive as far away from it as possible. "I mean, you know… you _have_ to know, I wouldn't think—"

"When should I have told you, huh? When would have been a good time to share that information with you? When you were trying to kill Benny?"

"Benny?" Sam blinks once, twice. Something in his face changes again, and Dean shuts his eyes against it. "Benny. Oh my god, Dean…"

"Don't, just— don't, okay? Yes, Benny."

Sam's hand has slid over his mouth. He looks pale. "I'm sorry."

"Don't start."

Sam, cowed, lets out a wobbly sigh. When he looks back down, his expression is grim. "Did Dad know?"

"No," Dean says quickly, then, less certain, "I don't know." He shakes his head. "I wasn't really sure. If he did or not. I don't think he did. I think—" Dean rubs at his eyes. "I thought if he knew, he wouldn't let me around you anymore. Cause… y'know."

"Jesus." Sam stares up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly. "How did I not know this?"

"Well, it's not exactly something I wanted to broadcast, Sammy."

"No, I know that, it's just— you're my brother. You know me better than— than anyone. Anyone, living or dead. You know _everything_ about me. And I didn't… Okay, no, this isn't about me, I have to—" Sam squeezes his eyes shut, wiping his hands over his face and running his fingers back into his sleep-tangled hair. "Thank you for trusting me, Dean."

"Shut up," Dean mutters. "Don't give me some after-school special crap. You basically had to hold me at gunpoint."

That startles Sam into an unsteady laugh. He drums his fist against the table. "Okay. Okay, so. You're…" Sam looks at Dean, waiting for him to finish the sentence.

"Not doing this with you. Next topic."

"All right, so then it wasn't that Cas was… that didn't have anything to do with it?"

"It had something to do with it," Dean admits. "Not everything to do with it." He feels his face heating and hides it in his hands. "Just made it easier at first. Jesus Christ, Sammy, I fucked up real bad."

"Do you… have feelings for Cas?"

Frantic laughter bubbles up out of Dean's throat. He can't stop it, and he covers his head with his arms, hunching down over the table while Sam looks at him like he's deranged. _Does he have feelings._ Christ.

"I don't get what's funny about this."

"There is nothing at all funny about this," Dean says, wiping his eyes. "Fuck me running. This is so not funny."

"I still don't get what actually _happened_."

"What happened is I pussied out."

"Don't— say shit like that, are you kidding me right now," Sam says with a baffled cough of a laugh. "God. You're an adult. Act like it. Step one: Have you tried apologizing?"

Dean's head thunks against the table.

"Okay, I'm gonna take that as a 'no'. Follow up question, _why the hell not?"_

Dean rubs his face into the sleeve of his robe, squeezing his eyes shut.

"Dean? All right, different question. Do you want… do you _want_ things to go back to normal or do you want something else to happen?" Sam sighs. "Not that I think you can really walk this one back exactly, but, you know. Cas is family. I can't even really wrap my head around some of the stuff you've been through together. I have to think you could come back from this."

"I want him to come home," Dean admits after a minute. His voice is wet and muffled by his sleeve. Sam reaches across to ruffle Dean's hair with a rough hand. Dean half-heartedly bats him away.

"Okay. That's a step. And, uh, before you think about how you're going to apologize. Because you're going to do that, because you're my brother, and you don't back down from shit that scares you, right?" Dean rolls his eyes, but Sam just laughs weakly. "Before you do that, I want to tell you that I love you, and I'm sorry. Because I think it must have been really… really hard to go through all that without anyone to talk to. And I hope you feel like you can talk to me about this, because you can."

"Shut the fuck up," Dean says, face hot.

"No, I will not shut the fuck up, I'm going to be emotionally sincere at you, and you can just sit there and take it." Sam gives Dean a wet smile. Dean sniffs, covering his eyes.

"Bitch," Dean mutters.

"Jerk."

Sam sips his lukewarm coffee, letting Dean gather his wits and pretend he's not a mess while he drinks his own. He wishes it had Baileys in it, but he's not gonna tell Sam that.

After a few minutes, Sam frowns, looking down at his hands. "You know what Cas and Rowena are trying to do, right?"

"I figured." Dean worries at his lip with his teeth. "You trust Rowena not to double-cross us?"

"I think she's serious about it, yeah. At the very least, she likes being owed favors. But you're… I mean, you still…?"

"I don't care," Dean says. "I just don't want him to get hurt." He ducks his head when Sam's face softens into a smile.

"Yeah, I know."

— 

Dean spends the next few days in the garage. Baby's had about all the tinkering she can take, but there are half a dozen other cars in there, and Dean needs something to focus on. He lifts the hoods, judges the damage. Mostly it's just neglect. They were all in pristine condition when the Men of Letters were wiped off the map, and they've been saved from real rust and decay by the bunker itself.

Dean, in his least salvageable jeans and his least likely to to be missed t-shirt, gets his hands dirty and just talks to himself.

"Cas, I— that was a stupid fucking thing I said," he mutters to himself, bent over the hood of a Packard. "I didn't mean that, I was. I was deflecting." He frowns. "No, now I sound like Sam, fuck that. Okay, I was— whatever. Cas, that shit I said, I was just— it wasn't because I think you're fucked up or broken or anything like that, it's because I was… I thought I wasn't good enough. I thought…" He swears, wiping his hands off with a rag. "I didn't want you to pity me. So I went on the attack. Like I always do, and I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said that to you. So… I'm sorry."

Dean reclines on the cement, working lubricant into the gears of the old motorbike. "Cas: I need to apologize to you for being a fucking dick. I'm a huge fucking dick, and I can't stop myself from being a huge fucking dick sometimes, and that's not fair to you, because you deserve a friend who's not gonna treat you like… like a huge fucking dick. I'm sorry. About me. Being a dick." Oil drips onto his nose, tickling his nostril, and he sneezes violently, ruining the shine of the paintjob. "Shit. God damn it. Stupid."

"Dear Castiel," Dean grits out, frowning at the sludgy mess of the brake lines he's realizing are going to have to be replaced, "I never stopped thinking that if anyone ever saw me with a guy they'd try to beat the shit out of me, and even though I've literally beaten Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and basically everything else in-between, that still freaks me out enough to make me act like a fucking lunatic around you. Sorry about that!"

He throws his wrench to the ground, cursing.

"I feel like you're going through some shit, and I can't help you with it, because I'm still— I'm so wrapped up in whatever this shit is up here," he says, rapping his knuckles against his head. "And it makes me feel like a dumb little kid again, and I don't know how to deal. And at the same time, all I want is…"

He sighs, his shoulders sinking.

"I wanted you back so bad, man. I didn't know what to do when you were gone. I didn't know how to.. to just keep going, after that. But then I _got_ you back, and I didn't know how to. How to have that, either. I didn't know how to… Fuck." He sits, sinking to the floor and covering his face in his oil-stained hands.

"All this ugly shit in my head, and you said I… you said my soul was 'beautiful'. And I couldn't even ask if that was true, if you really meant that."

He sits in the garage, listening to the dead air settle, for a while. Then he heaves himself up, groaning at the way his knees don't cooperate quite like they used to anymore, and goes to shower, to wash the grime from under his nails and shave.

He makes dinner, and makes quiet conversation with his brother and the Nephilim and the witch who share their table, and when he's alone in his room again, he picks up his phone and sends Castiel a text.

**I owe you an apology. I want to talk in person but I get it if you don't want to talk to me right now but you're my best friend and I miss you and you should know that**

There's not an immediate response. He knows he can't force Cas to respond. He also knows that if something were really wrong, he would have at least heard about it from Jody. But he still lies awake for a long time, unable to decide who to be more pissed at for the silence, Cas, or himself.

Dean doesn't realize he's fallen asleep until he's blinking awake again, his eyes struggling to adjust. He also doesn't remember leaving the desk light on. Then he notices someone standing over him, and he dives for his gun, adrenaline blanking his thoughts.

"Dean, it's only me," the someone says in alarm. Dean's finger stills on the trigger. Shooting wouldn't do him any good, anyway; it's Cas. Dean lets out a breath, setting the gun down on the side table heavily.

"Jesus Christ— don't— Don't do that."

"I'm sorry," Castiel says gravely.

Dean scrubs his fingers through his hair and down his face, forcing himself awake. "Thought you'd cooled it on watching me sleep."

Castiel has the audacity to blush.

Dean glances at his phone. It's a little past 1 AM. "When did you get in?"

"An hour ago. Everyone was asleep." His gaze drops, his stiff posture still somehow radiating embarrassment. "But… what you said."

Dean takes a steadying breath. "Right. That." He draws his legs up under the covers, resting his elbows over his knees. "Wait, I sent that like two or three hours ago. It's a six hour drive from…" Then Dean goes hot all over, because he realizes what he did. "Oh."

"I heard your prayers," Castiel said. "Every day. It was very distracting."

"M'sorry," Dean says, voice thin.

"I know. I heard that, too."

Dean's head drops between his knees, his hands grasping the back of his neck. His ears are buzzing. "Great. Awesome. I'm just gonna go fuckin'. Jump into a lake or something, then."

The bed dips by his foot. A cool hand reaches out to skate over his shoulder. Dean looks up to see Castiel sitting next to him, head cocked, regarding him quietly.

"I, uh." Dean clears his throat. "Okay, so. I guess you heard most of it, but I kind of wanted to say some of it anyway." He realizes he is very underdressed for this conversation in a t-shirt and boxers, but as long as he keeps the blanket over his lap, maybe he can maintain some of his dignity. "I'm sorry I… I'm always pushing you away and stuff. That isn't… I don't really want that."

Dean breathes in slow. Trying to force the words out in a way that makes sense to someone else when it barely makes sense to him is like vertigo, like trying to take a step forward while your feet stumble and lurch without your consent. He's already said it, and he knows Cas heard him. It shouldn't be this difficult to say it again. He feels like he has to anyway.

"I said something… really shitty, before you left, because I was freaked, and that makes me wanna… I feel like if I _make_ people leave, if I act like I know it's coming, it'll hurt less later. And that's a shitty way to act. And I didn't… I didn't mean what I said. I don't think you're broken, Cas. And I get why you'd… I mean, we've gone though a lot of the same garbage, and I think I understand, but—"

"No, that's not—" Cas says, and Dean looks up, startled. "You don't understand. Of course you don't, because I didn't… I didn't explain myself. I'm sorry."

Dean shuts his mouth. Cas looks at the ceiling, eyes darting back and forth like he's trying to read through the script of his own memories.

"I _am_ broken. I don't… function the way angels are meant to," Castiel explains. "I've been told that was a problem from a start. A flaw in my construct at the moment of creation."

Dean's face falls, anger bubbling up in his chest. Cas sounds so matter-of-fact about it, and Dean can't believe how fucked up this whole universe and everyone in charge of running it is.

"I'm explaining it badly again," Cas says, face stricken. "You're upset."

 _"Yeah_ , I'm upset. Those fuckers wouldn't know right from wrong if it kicked them in the ass. It _has_ kicked them in the ass, _you_ —"

Cas mutters, "The English language is so limiting sometimes," then meets Dean's eyes again, glittering with determination. "I'm _proud_ of what I am. A defective angel. I'm proud to have defected. It's one of the few things about myself that I truly value. It's the thing about me that makes me myself. The thing that differentiates me from the Castiels in other universes, in other timelines, who never realized what it was to care for you. Other beings can see this… crack in me, this deviation from God's intent, and they call it a deformity. In a literal sense, it is. And I love it. Because without it, I would never have earned your trust. I might never have come to know you as I do now, never have learned all the incredible things you've taught me. I wouldn't have a family that I chose above the one that was chosen for me, who love the things about me that Heaven would call deviant. I wouldn't have a son."

Castiel's hand on his shoulder grows warmer the longer it rests there. In the dim yellow light, he's _glowing_ , yet he looks soft enough to touch. Dean slides his hand over Castiel's, staring at the shadow Cas makes over his legs, framed against the lamp light. His throat feels tight.

"But those words… The meaning is different for you, of course it is. You heard me say I was defective, and… it hurt you. I hurt you."

Dean remembers. He had thought that if Castiel realized he deserved something better, he'd leave again.

"And before that. When I kissed you. I could feel myself causing you pain, and I couldn't figure out how to stop. I thought I was pushing you too hard, too quickly. I'm sorry, Dean."

"That wasn't," Dean croaks, his voice betraying him. "That wasn't your fault."

"I knew how much… conflict was tangled up in this, for you, but I still wanted you so much." Castiel's forehead creases, his expression anguished. "For a long time. I wanted you before I knew I could want anything at all."

"Jesus, Cas." He grips Castiel's hand tightly where it rests on his shoulder, too overwhelmed to look up and put a face to the bare desperation in his voice. "Why didn't you say something?"

"I thought I had."

The words spill out of Dean like a held breath released, low and urgent. "Cas, I _missed_ you. I missed you so goddamn much. I couldn't... I don't know how to do this without you."

"Dean," Cas sighs. His fingers trail over the sharp line of Dean's jaw. Dean feels like he's burning up from the inside out.

"I want you to stay," Dean says, voice straining in the quiet. "Please. I want you to stay with me. I want… I want _you_."

Castiel's fingers flex under his, spreading out so that Dean's weave between them. When Dean looks back up, his eyes are achingly soft, his mouth curved in a barely-there smile. Cas leans in close. Dean's eyes flutter shut, and Castiel lays a kiss right between them, one burning touch to his brow.

 _I dreamed about you,_ Dean thinks. The shift of Castiel's coat on the blankets is the sound of waves through a bedroom window.

"I meant what I said." Castiel's lips skate over each of his eyelids, then his cheek, then his mouth.

"Oh," Dean says, and the sound is lost in the press of Castiel's mouth to his.

"I can still see it." Castiel breathes the words into him. "Your soul. Layered over your body, like ink bleeding through paper." He untangles his hand from Dean's, holding his face, thumbs rubbing circles over his cheeks. "When you're happy, it's like it's bursting with light. Green and gold. Sunlight through the leaves." Dean's eyes fall open, disbelieving. Cas sighs, kissing him softly again. "Yes, like that."

Dean's hands grasp Castiel beneath his coat, pulling him closer so he can crush his whole body to Dean's while he kisses him. Castiel only breaks away to throw his leg over Dean's lap, going up on his knees to bend down to kiss him again. "When I found you, you were in pieces. They'd stamped you out to embers, trampled you down, and I held you, this… flickering little soul," Castiel whispers, pressing kisses to Dean's jawline, "and I saw your death, and your life, all the ways it had tried to douse your fire, and you were so _beautiful_."

Dean grips Cas by the hips, tugging him closer, until he's seated in Dean's lap. Dean has his shirt in two fistfuls, and he tugs until he can slide his hands up, over Castiel's ribs, across his back. Cas gasps, melting against him, only mostly managing to kiss his mouth.

"Dean," he moans. Dean wants to hear that again. He drags his lips and teeth over Castiel's neck, over the cord of muscle there. Cas shakes against him, fingers buried in his hair, holding him in place. _"Dean."_

Cas is wearing way too many clothes. He tells him so, between kisses and scrapes of his teeth. Cas grunts in exasperation, and it vibrates in Dean's chest.

"You're the one who made me buy them."

"Yeah, well, that was a stupid goddamn decision," Dean says, yanking the coat from Castiel's shoulders. Cas slides off his lap (terrible) and starts by stripping out of his blazer (better) before unbuttoning his shirt.

"You're lucky I did," Cas says. He's wearing a sports bra underneath, blue and white stripes. Dean almost bursts out laughing when he notices it looks just like Castiel's old tie, but he realizes that's not usually the desired reaction when you're looking at someone's mostly-naked body. "I know you have experience with women, but even you wouldn't want to have to unlace a bodice."

"Done that," Dean says, tugging off his own shirt, while Castiel kicks off his shoes and drops his pants. He's wearing white boxers underneath, another detail that makes Dean laugh fondly. "You know punk-y burlesque chicks."

"Not really, no."

"Cas, get over here," Dean mutters, then Cas is on him again, pushing back the covers and tangling his legs with Dean's. This body he's in is long and skinny, and Dean's hand feels big spanning over his ribs. None of that changes how strong Cas is, and he's a little shocked when Cas easily shoves him back against the bed, holding his chin with one stern hand so he can lick his way back into Dean's mouth. It's a little filthy and completely perfect, and Dean's unbelievably hard against Castiel's thigh. Dean bites down on Cas's lip and is rewarded for it when Cas hisses and bucks down into him, perfect dragging friction.

"Can I…?" Dean's thumbs slide under the band of Castiel's bra. Cas doesn't stop mouthing at Dean's jaw for a moment.

"Yes."

Cas shimmies out of the bra as Dean tugs it off over his head. Castiel's breasts are small and triangular, and Dean palms one, lowering his head to the other to suck it into his mouth. Castiel doesn't react dramatically, but when his nipple slides out of Dean's mouth and hardens in the air, he shivers, his grip tightening in Dean's hair. His expression, when Dean chances a look up, is dazed, looking down flushed and heavy-lidded at Dean, his mouth hanging open. Dean grins, thrilled to be the focus of such attention. He spends as much time as he's craving mouthing eagerly at Castiel's tits, since he hasn't sensed any objections. He rolls a nipple between his teeth, feeling the heat where Cas is straddling Dean, and Cas just says his name again like it's the highest praise he can think of.

Dean tilts him back, one hand splayed across his shoulders, the other gripping his hip, until he's laid out flat on the bed. Dean lifts his hips up, tugging his boxers down his thighs and lifting his legs in the air until he can pull them off completely. Cas hasn't shaved—anywhere in fact, which—he guesses that makes sense. Why would he? It's another detail about this Dean never could have imagined, any of the times he actually allowed himself to imagine it, that just kind of makes everything that much more perfect, because that means it's actually _happening_.

Dean bends over him, trailing kisses down his sternum, over the dip of his ribcage, across his stomach as it rises and falls. He bends Cas's leg, turning his attention to his thighs, and Cas lets himself be maneuvered, craning his head down to watch Dean suck marks into his skin, blue eyes wide and amazed. Then Dean dips down to lick his way up Castiel's slit and Cas's eyelids flutter in his struggle to keep them open.

"Anyone ever done this to you before?" Dean asks quietly. His tongue darts out, lapping at Cas's entrance just enough to tease, to get him wet, but not enough to really get him anywhere.

"I didn't have a vulva before," Cas says, voice low and just edging into breathless.

"Okay, yeah, I know that," Dean says, smothering a smile and an eyeroll into the flesh of Castiel's inner thigh. "But, I mean…" Dean licks another stripe from bottom to top, tugging to pull the hood of Castiel's clit up so he can seal his lips over it, planting his tongue at the base and sucking. Cas spasms under him, and Dean tries to hold him still, but it's not easy, and he compensates by moving his head with the motion of Castiel's hips rocking.

"Dean, oh... I... " Cas's voice cracks, breaking into a long groan. "No, that's… _oh."_

Dean really enjoys his part. He also hopes that the doors in the bunker are thick, because clearly Cas is enjoying it too. His thighs press into Dean's ears, his feet crossed over Dean's shoulders, so Dean puts his neck into it, sucking Castiel's clit and letting him fuck up against his tongue as hard as he wants. Cas drops a hand to Dean's head, sliding his fingers through Dean's hair almost gently, and Dean likes that, too. He wouldn't mind Cas tugging on it a little, but he seems content just letting his fingernails graze over Dean's scalp while his head bobs between Cas's legs. He gets an elbow up on the bed so he can slide a finger into him, then two, crooking them forward to see if Cas likes that, too.

He's hot and wet inside, clenching down around his fingers like he wants them deeper. Dean angles Cas's hips so he can lean them both to the side, allowing him more leverage to really fuck Cas in earnest, his shoulder working in time with Castiel grinding down against his tongue.

"Dean, _Dean…_ thank you, Dean, I... " Dean's gonna get an inflated ego, because while he's been thanked for a good time before, he's never been thanked this effusively, let alone with his face still buried in someone's cunt. He pulls off, unable to hold in a smile, needing to suck in a breath before he goes back in, and the puff of air against his wet folds makes Cas shiver all the way down to his toes, sighing in frustration. Dean goes back to work, letting the tension build back up until Cas seems about to snap, his spine arched and his breasts swaying with every gasp. It makes a _really_ nice picture, one that has Dean grinding down against the bed for relief.

Cas comes like it's a shock, the breath punched out of him, and he clamps down around Dean's fingers, going still for a long moment before he whimpers, his knees shaking where they're draped over Dean's shoulders. Dean lets him down gently, letting his fingers slide out and lapping at Cas's swollen clit just enough to make his eyes roll behind his eyelids. Dean's chin is wet, his jaw aching. Completely worth it. He pillows his head on Castiel's stomach, catching his breath while Cas comes down, still petting Dean's head, thumbs dipping behind his ears and carding through his hair.

"No," Cas says after a few minutes. He clears his throat. "No one has ever… done that. To me."

Dean's mouth curves into a tired smile. He's glad he could snag at least one of Cas's firsts.

Cas moves under him, sitting up until Dean is forced to lift his head. He takes Dean's face in his hands, kissing him solemnly, gently. Dean curls an arm around Cas and lays back down with him at the head of the bed, gratefully resting his neck on his very welcoming pillow, letting Cas drape himself across Dean's chest. Dean's mouth is sloppy and red and Cas just can't seem to stop kissing him, no matter how worn out they both are.

"I want to do that for you. I want to see you..." Cas mouths at Dean's chin, at his own wetness streaking Dean's jaw, at the beginnings of Dean's stubble, then down towards his ear, enthusiastic and aimless.

"Yeah? How d'you want me, Cas?" Dean's voice is ruined, but even he can hear how smug he sounds.

"I don't know," Cas says, breath hot in Dean's ear. "I don't— Every way. Any way. I want _everything_ , Dean, I don't know where to start. I just want you." Cas kisses him again, like he's starving for it. This is an aspect of Cas's personality he maybe should have had an inkling of, but it's making his head swim anyway, just with the headiness of being wanted so boundlessly. "Show me what you like. I want to know what you like."

"I'm pretty easy," Dean says, but he lets his hand slip down his stomach and grips his cock through his boxer briefs. There's a wet patch, and he lets his thumb roll over it, breathing out a sigh.

"I have not found that to be true at all," Cas says. Dean laughs, biting his lip, and Castiel's eyes fall to his mouth, trailing down his chest, watching his hand move. Dean, not one to deprive him of a show, tugs his waistband down, tucking it under so that his cock juts out, red and sticky with precome. Cas's eyes are fixed on him. Dean brings his palm up to his mouth, giving it one solid lick and bringing it back down to grip himself, giving his cock a good stroke, lifting his hips to meet his fist.

"Cas," Dean says. It feels good to say it, feels good to have his eyes on him, looking at him hungrily, good to have him tucked up under Dean's arm. Castiel winds his arms around Dean's neck, leaning in to press his nose to Dean's cheek, letting his lips brush Dean's jaw.

"Does that feel good?"

"Yeah." Dean strokes himself more steadily.

"Good. You deserve to feel good." Castiel's breath is hot against Dean's skin, and the words themselves make him feel hot all over, all down his chest and sinking warm into his belly. "I want you to feel this good all the time."

"Wouldn't get much work done," Dean huffs.

"I guess that's true," Cas says, and he starts to trace patterns over Dean's chest, over the protection sigil over his heart, across his flushed stomach, over his ribs, where Cas once carved words of praise in Enochian right into the bone. "But I want it anyway. I don't think I could ever tire of seeing you like this."

"Jeez, Cas. Make a guy blush." Dean glances over to find Cas watching his face rapturously.

"I want that, too. When you blush, it makes your eyes look so green. You're blushing right now, and I know it's just a natural physiological response, capillaries dilating, increased blood flow, but it's… arresting." Cas cups Dean's chin in his hand, swiping his thumb across his lip. Dean's tongue darts out to meet it. Cas's eyes watch it, dark and heavy. "Your body is so remarkable to me. It's been through so much. I had to put you back together, atom by atom, had to learn every nerve, every bone, every mark on your skin, and all of them, each one is perfect."

"Cas," Dean says. "Fuck."

"And under all of that, your soul, glowing so bright it sings." Cas lets his thumb slip between Dean's lips. Without thinking, Dean sucks it into his mouth. Cas takes it back a moment later, then reaches down to roll a thumb over Dean's nipple, bringing with it a shock of cold that sends pleasure coursing through him. "My siblings... When they talk of my deformity, they say there's a 'crack in my chassis'. They say I'm _cracked_. And I'm so glad. I'm so grateful for that, Dean. Do you understand why?"

Dean can hardly think coherently, let alone speak. He fucks his hand helplessly, letting Castiel trace feather-light shapes over his abdomen, his heartbeat roaring in his ears under the relentless, brutal kindness of Castiel's voice.

"Because when you're happy, your soul shines brighter, golden and warm and beautiful, and you shine into all the cracks in me." Cas kisses him, holding him, while his breath stutters and his hips move, lifting up from the bed to meet the tight circle of his fist. "Maybe that sounds silly to you, but I don't know how else to explain it."

'Silly' is maybe not the word Dean would use. He has to shut his eyes, feeling them prickle, his eyelashes wet and sticking. Fuck. What the fuck.

He hears Cas shifting, and then there's a soft hand stilling his, replacing his, wetness and warmth. A tremor goes through him, and then Cas starts to pump him in his fist, slow at first, then faster, steady, trying to match the pace Dean had started. Dean braces his feet against the bed, grasping Cas's hip in one hand, twining their fingers together with the other. Cas moves so that when Dean's head falls back, he's bracketed by Cas's shoulder, and Cas holds him like that, working his cock until Dean's panting, open-mouthed and light-headed.

"Of course I'll stay with you," Cas says. "I'm here, Dean. I have you."

"Cas, _fuck_ , I—" Dean's orgasm lances through him, white-hot and overwhelming. Cas holds him through it, fisting his cock until Dean's shooting streaks of come up his chest in pulses, over his belly, over Castiel's knuckles. When he sinks, boneless, back to the bed, Cas keeps stroking him until it's just this side of too much, letting Dean's cock slowly soften in the palm of his hand. Dean should probably feel self-conscious, and he's so overstimulated it makes him want to pass out a little bit, but he also feels so strangely, completely safe. Cas has him. He's not going anywhere. The weight and depth of his regard is bigger than anything Dean's ever felt, big enough to let him sink into. To be held by.

He feels Cas easing him to the bed distantly, and there's a tickling sensation on his brow. Castiel's grace tingles over his skin, leaving him feeling clean and refreshed. Then Cas is with him again, pulling the covers up and crowding up behind him, curling an arm over his stomach. Dean dozes off that way, light and untroubled, Castiel's steady body against his back.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay.... it's the end! We're here! Oh god! Aaaaaa!! Happy Valentine's Day, everyone, I know it's not a wedding fic, but I hope it'll make you smile anyway.
> 
> Thank you so so so so much to everyone who's read and commented, I can't tell you how much it's meant to me that people received the story well. I hope you'll enjoy the conclusion too. Extra effusive thanks to Riss, for being my second set of eyes and cheering me on as I wrote, and to Z, for making my entire life with incredible works of art inspired by the fic. I'm still just amazed at how lucky I am!!!
> 
> Tag list has been updated, including the addition of a minor Sam/Rowena tag, cause we're edging into that territory now. I can't help it.
> 
> If you'd like to say hi or shout at me on tumblr, I have a new one just for SPN shitposting at [nyangel-catstiel](https://nyangel-catstiel.tumblr.com/)! And if you'd like to reblog the fic, I made a new post for it [right here](https://nyangel-catstiel.tumblr.com/post/643114459567636480/to-be-restored-spn-fic-complete). Thanks again, everyone.
> 
> * * *

When Dean slides, warm and drowsy, back into consciousness, they've shifted. Dean is on his back, one arm tucked under his pillow, the other tingling and cold because Cas is cutting off his circulation. He shifts, groaning, feeling the prickling sensation of his fingers waking up. 

Cas, for his part, is sitting up, one hand on Dean's collarbone, the other slung across the headboard. The hand on Dean's chest tickles a bit, sending tingles of a different sort across Dean's skin.

"Good morning," says Castiel. He doesn't sleep, but by the feel of him, he's still completely nude, which is as good as confirmation that he spent the night watching Dean sleep. Dean doesn't chance opening his eyes yet. Just the thought of it makes his cheeks burn. He turns his head towards Cas, and Dean's forehead comes to rest against bare skin.

"Hey," Dean says, his voice rough and cracking. He shifts again, tightening his arm around Cas's midsection and hugging him closer.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Yeah," Dean says, muffled by the press of his lips to Castiel's sternum. Better than he has in months, if he's honest. Maybe years. Cas brushes soft fingertips over Dean's brow.

"Good," Cas says. There's a hint of smugness to it. Dean wonders if Cas did some mojo on him in his sleep. If he did, Dean doesn't care. He can abuse his angelic powers as much as he wants if it means Dean gets to wake up feeling this awesome.

Now that he's more present, he's noticing another thing that's perking up, like Cas didn't talk him through the most emotionally exhausting orgasm of his life just a few hours ago. It's been a long time since Dean was with anyone, and longer still since he woke up next to someone. That someone being Cas makes it practically dreamlike. The only thing separating it from a fantasy is that Dean's mouth tastes stale with sleep, and he's still got pins and needles up to his shoulder. Cas's thigh moves, nudging the beginnings of a pretty insistent hard-on, and Dean breathes out sharply against Cas's skin.

"We should, uh… We should probably have more of a," Dean murmurs, swallowing a sound when their bodies move again. "A conversation. Right?"

"We can discuss whatever you'd like," Cas says, but he's not helping the situation at all by skimming his fingers over Dean's hipbones, where the blankets have bunched up at their waists.

Dean wets his lips. His eyes blink open slowly. Cas must have turned the light out while Dean was sleeping; everything has a hazy, monochrome quality to it in the darkness, but he can make out enough to tell that he's basically face-level with Castiel's breasts. Yeah, there are definitely worse ways to wake up in Dean Winchester's book.

"Said a lot of stuff last night, a'course," Dean mumbles, letting his mouth press against Castiel more deliberately. Cas sighs faintly above him, and his arms wrap more closely around him, which has the very positive side effect of pressing his breasts against Dean's cheek. "I might need to, uh…" Dean turns his head to press a lazy kiss to one hardening nipple. "...wake up a little more, first."

"Whatever you need." Cas's voice is a low rumble, and it vibrates in his chest where Dean's ear rests. Just that sound is enough to take Dean from hazy desire to full, heady arousal. His hips move in helpless little circles, trying to get some friction. One of Castiel's hands ghosts down his back, tracing his spine, then lower, dipping down to— Oh, fuck.

"Cas," Dean groans, face burning. "That's— um. I don't..."

Cas's hand stills, then vanishes, which is a relief and a disappointment in equal parts.

"No?"

"Don't get me wrong, I, uh— I mean. Jesus." He's thought about it. He's _definitely_ thought about it. Maybe once he's had a chance to prepare a little. "Later. Definitely. Uh, rain check."

"All right," Cas says, and Dean feels him press a kiss to the crown of his head. "Another time."

That makes Dean's stomach do a little flip, because _there's going to be another time._ Provided he manages not to screw this up again. His head spins at the thought of more mornings like this, letting himself be held by Cas, his best friend, who looks at him like the sun shines out of his ass. He wonders how the hell they got here, and that question wars with another in his mind: how the hell have they not been doing this for years? Dean knows how, of course, but now that he's got it, he doesn't want to give it up again. He feels like an idiot for not getting here sooner.

"Yeah, definitely another time," Dean mutters, then tries to distract himself from the way his heart is racing by getting himself another mouthful of tit. So maybe he's got kind of an oral fixation, sue him.

Cas shimmies down a little, and Dean's mouth travels as he does, over Cas's collarbone and up the curve of his neck. Cas is the one who dips in to kiss Dean's mouth, sweet and smiling. If he cares that Dean's got morning breath, he sure doesn't act like it. Then Cas slings a leg over Dean's hip and hitches himself up so that Dean's sliding against his wet heat, and Dean groans long and loud and shocked. He tries to muffle the sound into Castiel's shoulder.

"Fuck, what time is it," Dean huffs. He grinds against Cas, feeling the head of his dick nudging at Cas's clit, and his leg tightens where it's wrapped around Dean's, a heel digging into the back of his thigh to pull him closer.

"Almost eight," Cas grunts.

Okay, so he needs to keep it down if he doesn't want to alert the entire bunker. Got it. Not that it's easy when Castiel's rolling his hips like he's trying to start a fire or something. Then Cas is reaching down between them, taking Dean in hand, holding still long enough to get him lined up so that he can slide inside. Cas breathes in sharply when Dean bites down on his shoulder to muffle the sound that threatens to spill out of him. The gasp turns into an unabashedly loud groan as Dean sinks in deep.

 _"Oh."_ Cas holds Dean utterly still. He's so _hot_ , gripped tight around his cock, and Dean screws his eyes shut, trying to keep from moving. "That's…"

"You okay, buddy?" Dean grits out.

"Yes," Cas says, breathless. "Yes, I'm… okay. Thank you for asking."

"Yeah, no problem." Dean breathes deeply, stroking Castiel's back while he adjusts. Then Cas is moving again, rolling his hips forward, and Dean follows his lead.

The first thrust is slow, and the next few almost exploratory. Cas cradles Dean's head to his shoulder, leisurely rocking against him. Then his hands slide back down, gripping Dean's ass in two firm handfuls, and Dean surges forward in shock, hitting harder and deeper and _god_ , it's so good. Cas seems reluctant to let him go too far, keeping Dean buried inside him with unearthly strength. Dean keeps kissing Castiel's pulse point, letting his tongue soothe the bite mark he left behind earlier, and soon, Cas's arms relax enough for Dean to move in longer, steadier strokes. Then Cas is holding his face again, fingers splaying over his cheeks, pulling him up to be kissed.

If Dean didn't have to breathe, he's pretty sure Cas wouldn't let him, with the way he's desperately clinging to him, sealing his mouth to Dean's and pressing himself tight against Dean's chest. When Dean does break away to breathe, Cas just presses heated kisses to his jaw and whispers his name like a chant.

It's both tender and tense, the air between them crackling with heat. Dean gets to have this, and he can't imagine that he's earned it, but the proof of Cas molded against him is incontrovertible. When he comes, shuddering, it's with Cas's legs holding him deep inside while he groans into Cas's open mouth. Cas holds him there for a long time, letting him catch his breath. Light kisses on his forehead leave spots that cool in the open air. When he slips out of Cas, gone soft and oversensitive, Cas sighs like he's disappointed.

Dean tilts Cas gently aside, sliding a hand down his stomach and carding through the coarse curls between his thighs.

"You need a little more?"

Cas sighs again, spreading his legs for Dean. "I just like having you that close." Dean slots himself up against Cas's back, stroking his chest and belly with one hand while the other dips down to where Cas is still soaked with arousal and Dean's come. Cas shivers. Dean spreads him open with his thumb and ring finger, dipping inside him and spreading wetness up towards his clit. "In my true form, I could hold you inside myself easily."

"Not that I'm not... up for just about anything with you, but I also like having eyes," Dean says, laughing as he rubs circles with his forefingers.

"I don't want to hurt you, no," Cas says, low and dejected. "But I like— _mmm_ —being with you this way, too, it… it definitely has its— _ah!_ —its good qualities…"

"I, um. I had a dream about you," Dean says, his lips brushing Castiel's ear. "You looking like, y'know. An angel. No vessel."

"You did?"

"Yeah, it… I dunno if it was what you really look like or not, but either way… you were really something else, Cas."

"Oh?" Cas shivers faintly against Dean's chest while Dean's fingers slide into him, teasing around his entrance.

"Yeah. Yeah, you were fuckin' gorgeous."

Cas cranes his head back to look at him, his eyes hazy with pleasure, with parted lips that Dean can't help but kiss.

Eventually, Dean gets into a rhythm that seems to work for Cas, fucking him with his fingers while Cas grinds against the firm base of his palm. The only problem is that Cas is turning out to be… kind of fucking _loud_ in bed, and while Dean can definitely appreciate the appeal of that, he has no desire to broadcast everything they're doing to their entire family. With that in mind, he cups his palm over Cas's mouth, whispering hushed sounds in his ear until he's shaking and coming in Dean's hands.

As soon as he's present again, Cas twists back around to hug Dean's front, cradling Dean's head to his chest. They stay that way for a while, just breathing into each other, letting their sweat cool. Dean's sticky with more than just sweat, but he's not about to pull away before Cas is ready to let him go. Hell, if Cas wants to stay in here all day, he might be convinced to give up food and water for the privilege, though he's realizing he's going to need to use the bathroom soon.

Eventually, he huffs, reluctantly mumbling, "M'gonna need to shower and stuff in a minute here."

"Mmm. No," Cas says, and kisses his forehead. Ice cold grace spreads out from his brow, taking away the unclean sheen of sweat and everything else that had been clinging to him. Dean snorts, pulling back from Cas to stare down at him.

"Nearly-unlimited angelic powers, and you're using them like a sex towel."

"Hardly unlimited," Cas says gravely, and Dean just laughs and dips in to kiss the frown from his lips.

"We gotta leave sometime, Cas. I have to eat," Dean says. "I have to piss."

"Urination is the Sisyphean curse of humanity," Cas says with a withering glare at Dean's crotch, and that makes him laugh even harder, tucking his face into the crook of Cas's shoulder. Okay, maybe he can put off leaving for a few more minutes. He relaxes against the bed, letting Cas hold him a little longer.

After a bit, Dean asks, "How'd your hunt with Claire go?"

Cas hums, the sound vibrating. "It was… nice. She's become a very capable young woman. But she's also very sensitive. She's a lot like you, in that way."

"And not just because we're both 'troubled teens'?" Dean says, snorting a laugh. Cas taps him on the head to quiet him.

"She was on her way out of town to handle a ghoul infestation, and she very kindly allowed me to assist. I… wasn't sure how she might react to my new vessel."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. She… well, I thought she might be happy I didn't look like her father anymore."

Dean pulls back to watch Castiel's face while he talks, thumb skimming over his ribs.

"That's actually one of the reasons I went to her. I felt I owed her a… conversation, about her father, now that I'm no longer… occupying his body."

"How'd that go?" Dean says gently.

"She really surprised me," Cas says, eyes distant.

"What d'you mean?" Dean nudges Castiel's nose with his, trying to get him to look directly at him.

"I… feel an attachment I didn't expect to my former appearance. I know it's not my true face, I know it doesn't really _belong_ to me," Cas says. "But it's the form I took when I met you. The face I wore when I underwent the most meaningful changes of my existence. I lived as a human in that body. I've learned more about myself in these few years than I ever could have imagined. I've built a family. I've been an angel, and I've been a human, and I think where I really belong in the end must be… somewhere in between."

"Here," Dean says, not intending to sound as hopeful as he does. But Cas just smiles at him, with absolute certainty.

"Yes. Here. I didn't want to ask Claire if she'd allow me to take that form again. I didn't think I had any right, after everything she'd been through. But she understood what I was feeling. What I wanted. Now… I'm not sure I want it anymore. Perhaps it doesn't matter as much as I thought it did."

Dean studies his face for a minute, trying to decipher it. He doesn't look like he used to, but he's still Cas under there. Dean can feel him holding something back.

"I think it does matter, though," Dean says. "Whatever you wanna do, I'm here, man, I swear. But I feel like it matters to you. Did Claire tell you no?"

"No," Cas says. "That's part of what surprised me. She… What she actually said was that she thinks of me like a 'really weird uncle'. Which is… more than I deserve. But she also told me my appearance wouldn't change things between us."

"So what's the hangup?"

Castiel's eyes drift down, his brow creasing.

"Cas?" 

"Wouldn't it be easier to just stay as I am?"

"Well, sure, I guess, but… You told me you weren't happy. Your new face dredges up all that bad shit with Ishim, right?"

"I've done much more terrible things, objectively speaking, in Jimmy Novak's body. I killed so many people, so many angels. However much I might have changed for the better, I also made so many… unforgivable mistakes."

"Who says they're unforgivable? Hey," Dean says, taking Cas's chin and holding him still. " _I_ forgive you, Cas. You think I haven't made just as many mistakes as you have? You ever think I don't wanna be me sometimes, too?"

"Dean." Cas looks so sad it makes Dean's chest ache. "Thank you. But I don't want to cause any more trouble for you."

"Trouble for _me?_ What trouble?" Dean stares at him, puzzling. When he puts it together, it's like a cold knife through his gut. "Cas, don't tell me you're staying like this for _me_."

Cas stares at his throat, breathing too evenly. "Would that be so terrible?"

Dean balks. "Do you really think I'm that big a coward?"

"Of course not!" Cas looks up again, alarmed. "Of _course_ I don't."

"Then why don't you let me handle that on my own? That's not your shit to deal with. You don't need to take that on for me."

Dean can hear the way Cas's breath starts to grow ragged. He holds Cas's face in his hands, steeling his jaw.

"Listen to me, Cas. I'm in this, no matter what you look like. I want you either way. And I want you to do what you wanna do, not… whatever you think is gonna be _easier_ for me. Jesus." Dean swipes his thumb over Castiel's cheek. "Did you not hear me earlier? I was into you when I pictured you as, like, this ball of fire with wings and eyeballs and shit. And if you really wanted to look like that, then okay! I can put on some fucking sunglasses! You get me?"

Cas laughs a bit, a wet little cough. Dean's thumb catches a tear beginning to trail down his cheek, and Dean kisses him once, firm and definitive.

"Are you hearing me right now?"

"Yes," Cas says, voice unsteady. "Yes, I hear you, Dean."

"Okay. Good." Dean kisses him again, lingering a moment this time, and Cas sighs into it, letting himself be held.

— 

It's much later in the morning than Dean had intended when he finally admits defeat in the war against his bladder and Cas lets him slip away to flip the lights on and dress in fresh clothes. He sort of wants to offer Cas another one of his shirts to dress in, mainly because he thinks it would add infinitely to Dean's overall quality of life, but he also knows that Sam's gonna be giving him enough funny looks when they finally come out, and he doesn't need to court any more of those.

Cas dresses in his own clothes. While the rest of him looks put together, his hair is still an impressive nest. Dean smiles, carding his fingers through it, trying to sort it back into a state of relative tidiness, with limited success. Cas takes the opportunity to lean in, slipping his arms around Dean's midsection and stealing another lingering kiss.

"Never gonna make it out of here at this rate," Dean says quietly.

"Mm." Cas seems unbothered, and kisses him again, groping the soft skin of his sides under his shirt once before releasing him. Dean has apparently unleashed some kind of ravenous horndog monster. But Cas does, in his benevolence, eventually let him slink away into the bathroom.

When Dean walks into the library, he is alarmed to find Jack and Rowena seated across from one another at the table in some kind of magic standoff. Jack's eyes glow gold, Rowena's violet, two pencils hovering before them, wobbling precariously in the air. Both of them are frowning in concentration while Sam and Cas look on.

"Is this a carnival game now?" Dean's entrance breaks Jack's concentration, and his pencil clatters to the table. "Whoever floats their pencil highest wins a prize?"

"I know what I'd like to win," Rowena says, her pencil settling down to the table with a gentle click. She smirks across the table at Sam, who immediately turns his attention to Dean.

"Hey, you're up," he says, looking harried. Dean gives him an _Are you seeing this?_ look, to which Sam merely shrugs helplessly. Dean had thought they were trying to keep Jack's situation low key, given Rowena's hate-on for Lucifer, but apparently that's gone right out the window.

"Don't worry your wee head about it," Rowena says, picking up on the silent exchange. "Did you really think I hadn't figured out who Jack is by now? I know you're not the brightest Winchester, but honestly. Jack's nothing like his father. He's a good, honest little boy, aren't you Jack?"

Jack, dejected, is gazing at his pencil, but he smiles faintly when addressed. "Rowena's told me a lot about Lucifer."

"Have you," Dean says suspiciously.

"Only how lucky he is to have a far superior male role model in his life now," Rowena says, batting her eyelashes.

Dean narrows his eyes, looking at Cas. Rowena shakes her head incrementally. Dean frowns in confusion.

"Um. Thank you?"

"I _meant_ Samuel." She winks at Sam, who seems determined to address literally anyone else in the room apart from her.

"They decided to show Cas how much control Jack's gaining, since he got back in this morning," Sam says pointedly.

"Right," Dean says, and looks across to catch Cas's eye again. Cas, straight-faced and silent, doesn't correct him. He's giving Dean an out, to pretend everything's normal a while longer. Dean's chest aches.

"I can do it better than that," Jack says, frowning at the pencil. "I just have to focus." The pencil slices through the air, zipping straight up to smash into the ceiling. Wood chips litter the table, scattered across the tops of Jack and Rowena's heads. Rowena shakes out her chin-length curls with a grimace. Jack's eyes are round and alarmed. "I'm sorry…"

"Jack, you're doing just fine," Cas says, brushing the detritus out of Jack's hair with an encouraging smile. "There's no rush." He looks up, locking eyes with Dean. His smile falters just a fraction.

"Uh, hey, Jack, Rowena, could you… help me find the dustbuster?" Dean can hear the stupid face Sam is making without looking.

Jack goes to him without hesitation. Rowena stares at Sam like he's announced he's going to be running for President.

"I _think_ I left it in the _basement_ somewhere, but I forget where," Sam says, raising his eyebrows at her.

"Sam, drop the Amelia Bedelia act." Dean crosses his arms. "It's okay."

"Uh," Sam says, round-eyed and guilty.

"It's okay," Dean repeats, and sidles up to Cas, nudging his shoulder with his. "Yeah?" Cas breaks into a soft smile that makes Dean's face go hot. How's he supposed to get anything done with Cas just smiling at him like that all the time?

Sam's eyes dart between the two of them, his shoulders relaxing. Then he's the one smiling, and Dean has to duck his head, clearing his throat.

"Is there coffee?" He dips away towards the kitchen, ears burning.

And then, things are just… normal. Dean's body doesn't know how to relax into it. He's been in his head about this for such a long time— weeks? Depending on how you count it, years; maybe even since he was old enough to know to be worried. 

He's prepared for the next hit, the reason it can't go right, the interrogations, but in the few weeks that follow, none of them ever come. He makes dinner most nights, and Sam and Rowena bicker in a way Dean is shocked to describe as "companionable." Rowena delivers surprisingly non-objectionable sermons to Jack about avoiding abuses of power and appreciating your gifts, none of which Dean is ready to believe she lives by herself, but hey. Cas and Jack have barely-comprehensible conversations about metaphysical questions that alternately make Dean's head hurt or unsettle him so badly he has to excuse himself from the room. Sam doesn't force him to talk, and Dean isn't forthcoming, but when Dean slides his hand into Cas's in the safety of a dimly-lit TV room on what's becoming their weekly movie night, nobody says a word about it. Almost like it's actually okay.

The thing that really gets to Dean is how much things between him and Cas don't change at all. He's been in very few actual, long-term relationships, but he remembers it feeling a lot like getting under the hood of a car. There's the shiny, enticing exterior, and then there's the actual inner workings, and all the potential for grease and rust and backbreaking work that goes along with it. Maybe it's work you enjoy doing, maybe it's a waste of time. Maybe you waste a whole lot of your life trying to fix something that's never gonna run. Or maybe you put in the work, and you get a daydream like his Baby.

What he's realizing about him and Cas is that they've gone through a lot of the work already. Years of knowing a person, you get a pretty good idea of what makes them tick. There's more to uncover, Dean's sure, but Cas has seen the worst parts of him. Same goes for Dean. The main difference now is that when Dean finds himself a hunt and says he's going to go it alone so Sam can stay and watch Rowena and Jack, and Cas calls him a reckless idiot, and Dean calls him a hypocrite in turn, at the end of the day, when the corpses are salted and burned and they kiss and make up, there's a lot more actual kissing involved.

When Dean pauses long enough to really look at what his life is right now, to think about the things he used to think weren't meant for people like him, he's forced to admit that maybe those things just didn't look the way he thought they did. That didn't mean he didn't have them.

He thinks about Mom, putting away her knives and putting on a sundress, unwrapping a store-bought apple pie and presenting it to a child who couldn't tell them apart from the ones he saw on TV and would spend the rest of his life watching screens for guidance on what life should be like. He thinks about Dad, about the photos left behind in a box in the basement of a house that devours people whole. How he pasted over their mother with polaroids so he could tell them stories about an angel.

Dean's met angels, and they're nothing like the stories either.

Then he thinks about angels watching over him, just like Mom used to tell him. He thinks about angels, pulling strings, shooting arrows, penning his parents in together like you'd breed animals. And then he thinks about Castiel, tearing the whole rotten operation down with a touch.

At night, Cas kisses him until his mind quiets, and touches him with hands that unraveled God's will just to see him at peace, and Dean tries to trust it.

—

"I've a list of ingredients for you," Rowena says, presenting Castiel with a sheet torn off a yellow legal pad. Her hair is almost back to its former glory, red and lustrous and finally touching her shoulders. It's grown more than seems natural for such a short span of time. Dean guesses she's been testing her strength on glamours for herself before she pulls out the big guns for Cas.

Dean peeks over Cas's shoulder at her flowing scrawl. "Six eggs? What is he, a custard pie?"

"Embryonic components are vital to the spell," Rowena explains. "It's part transformation, part time magic. We're reversing time on Castiel's form, but since he doesn't age naturally, it's more like…"

"Hitting the undo button until he's him again?"

"I suppose," Rowena says with a flick of her eyebrows. "If that helps you understand it. What matters is that I'm _certain_ it will work, as long as you other little Winchesters cooperate."

"What do you need?" Dean says without hesitation. Maybe he should be more wary of putting their fates in Rowena's hands, but he's starting to get used to having her around, like an annoying roommate. Also he quietly suspects that Sam's screwing her behind his back, which… Like, okay, he's got some critiques about Sam's taste, but Dean can't exactly criticize when he looks at his own history.

He can feel Cas watching him, and maybe that softens his mistrust a little, too.

"Castiel has a strong image of himself, but the physical projection needs to be _ironclad_ to make sure it shapes correctly while preserving his current mental state. And one way to do that is to… shore it up, using the psychic bonds he's formed with those closest to him."

"My family," Castiel says, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. Dean's hand brushes his back.

"So, I can help?" Jack sits up straight, energized.

"Jack never saw you in person before, though, right, Cas?" asks Sam.

"We still communicated," Cas says. "More directly than speaking, even." Cas takes Dean's hand, squeezing it gently. Despite being surrounded by people, Dean doesn't flinch away from it. "You wouldn't remember it now, but it's not unlike the day we met."

"When you blew every fuse in that barn, or when you were breaking windows and turning on radios at me?" Dean asks with a chuckle.

"No," Castiel says. "Before that." And Dean shuts his mouth, because what can he even say? "I've touched all of your souls, at one point or another. I can't think of anyone who knows me better."

"In mind, in body, in spirit," Rowena says. "All the food groups!"

Some of the components are things Rowena can send for, but others have to be ordered from weird places on the internet that even Dean, who would probably have blown the laptop to Hell with pop-ups had he not finally been shown the magic of a robust adblocker, is a little nervous about. But in the end, all they have to do is wait for everything to arrive and… that's it. The rest is in Rowena's well-manicured hands.

In the meantime, Dean and Sam pick up another hunting job, something that seems likely to be a vampire on the move heading up towards Montana. Sam and Cas put up a united front to convince Dean it's okay to leave, that Cas has things well in hand back at the bunker. Dean still asks Sam to text them while he's busy driving, just to make sure nobody blew the place up or accidentally opened any more portals to other universes, and he calls Cas as soon as they check into their room that night.

"You've been gone for twelve hours," Cas says, irritation bleeding through. "I promise I'm not so incompetent I can't occupy my son and one witch for one day."

"No, I know that," Dean groans. "I'm just— I dunno." He paces in the empty room, anxiously peeking out the window to see if Sam's back with dinner yet. Dean's never been one to complain about fast food, but if he's honest, he's gotten kind of used to cooking for himself. It's been… well, nice, not to have to eat stuff that came out of a bag all the time. It makes him feel accomplished when something comes out just the way he imagined it. It feels like a job well done, keeping his family fed. "It's not— I trust you, Cas, of course I do."

"I know," Cas says, sighing softly. They lapse into silence, just the sound of Dean's feet on the carpet and Castiel's breath through the receiver. It makes Dean wish Cas was here with him, and that makes him feel a little bit like a fourteen year old girl mooning over a crush. He's a grown ass adult, he can be away from Cas for a few days. He's done it often enough. But of course, whether he _can_ and whether he _wants to_ are two different things, aren't they?

"I just miss you, is all," he mumbles, feeling the blush rise up his neck. Nobody can even see him, but god, he's embarrassing.

"I miss you too, Dean," Cas says. Dean can hear him smiling through the phone, and then he realizes _he's_ smiling, hard enough to make his cheeks hurt. Someone shoot him, now.

His heart nearly launches itself out through his throat when the door swings open and Sam walks in, greasy paper bags in hand. Dean coughs, wiping his hand over his face like that'll wipe the red from his cheeks, and turns his back to the doorway, planting his hand on his hip in faux-nonchalance.

"But yeah, uh, Sam's back now, so I guess we're gonna eat and hit the sack. If we can catch up with the vamps tomorrow morning, we might be back before the day's out."

"Then let's hope you can track them efficiently," Cas says pleasantly. "I've been thinking about what I'd like to do for you next time I see you."

"I— yeah?" Dean clears his throat, glancing back at Sam, who thankfully seems occupied by shaking up a plastic tub of salad.

"Yes. Last time you let me use my fingers while we—"

"Oh, uh—"

"—and I'd like to see if I can make you—"

"Uh-huh, yeah—"

"—with that alone."

"Okay sounds great Cas gotta go bye!"

Dean hangs up. He also counts to five before he turns back around, willing his face to look normal.

"How's Cas doing?" Sam says, shoving a plastic forkful of leafy greens into his perfectly unsmiling mouth. Dean stares at him suspiciously.

"Great. Rowena didn't run off with Jack and make him murder anyone, so call that a win." Dean looks down to fire off a scandalized text to Cas before he reaches for his foil-wrapped burger, too antsy to sit down while he eats it.

"Cool," Sam says. They eat in relative silence for a while while Dean ignores the string of emojis Cas has sent him, before Sam ruins it by talking again. "You guys got everything figured out, then?"

"What?" Dean says, then, "Shut up."

"Shutting up," Sam says, tossing his hands up in surrender. A minute later he ruins it again. "I just wanna say, I think it's nice to see you—"

"Sam, I swear to every God there is—"

"—happy! Shutting up again. I will never speak another word on it. You giant baby."

" _I_ — Okay, smart guy, you wanna be cute, what's the deal with you and Rowena?"

"Deal?" Sam says around a mouthful, and he swallows with tremendous effort. "What deal?"

"Don't give me that. One minute we're about to gank her, the next you're picking out curtains with her at Bed Bath and way fucking Beyond."

"It's not like that," Sam says, staring at his salad and spearing it with a fork in a way that says it might be kind of like that. "It's… I dunno, man, it's complicated."

"That what your Facebook status says?" Sam makes a face at him, and Dean makes one right back. "What, I don't have to have a Facebook to know what's on Facebook."

"You have a Facebook, Dean. I've seen your Facebook."

"It's just for Farmville," Dean says, and shoves the last bite of burger into his mouth. Sam rolls his eyes, his shoulders hunched over the little two-seater motel table.

"Rowena… She kinda…" Sam huffs, running his hands back through his hair. He leans back in the rickety little chair, his jaw working. "There are things about me that she… gets. That most people just kind of don't."

"A shared hatred of Satan?"

Sam snorts. "I mean, sure, that. But not just that. She… She doesn't handle me with kid gloves."

"Well, yeah, she's tried to kill you a few times."

" _We've_ tried to kill each other a few times. It's something I've learned to overlook, I guess."

Dean scoffs, tossing his empty wrapper into the bag and sitting down heavily on the end of one of the beds. "Okay, so, how does she _'handle'_ you, then?"

"Ha ha," Sam sneers. "She… you know, we've both done some stuff we're not too proud of. But she's not scared of herself like—" Sam blinks rapidly, squaring his shoulders. "She wants to be better, but she's not so wrapped up in beating herself up over it that she loses herself. If anything, it just makes her fight harder. I admire that. Maybe you think that's stupid."

"I don't think it's stupid," Dean says. "I just think you could find some better role models. Probably just by walking outside and grabbing any random person off the street."

"Come on," Sam says, rolling his eyes.

Dean chews at his lip, mulling it over. "Are you really scared of yourself, Sammy?"

"Aren't you?" Sam turns to look at him, finally. Dean squirms away from it.

"You oughta give yourself more credit than that, that's all I'm saying."

"Well, Rowena gives me credit," Sam says, and Dean quiets down at that. If Sam's getting more validation from _Crowley's mom_ than his own brother, that's on Dean, isn't it?

"I'm not tryna criticize you," Dean says. "I just wanna make sure you're… you know, okay." Worrying about Sam is what Dean _does_. Which is maybe part of the problem.

"Yeah, I get it, man." Sam finishes his dinner, picking at the last little bits of diced tomato in front of him distantly.

The quiet in the room is tense as Dean dresses down for bed while Sam gathers up the trash. It's only when Sam's about to put the light out and do the same that Dean asks, "You really trust her that much?"

Sam sighs, pushing his hair back. "We understand each other. It's a little different than trust." He looks up, and Dean's struck by how much older Sam looks now, how time and tragedy have carved a man out of the little kid Dean used to feed handfuls of store-brand Cheerios to. He still sees that kid looking out of Sam's eyes most of the time, but he's buried under more weight than even Dean, with his eighty years of living shoved into his nearly forty-year-old body, can wrap his head around. "But, you know… yeah. I think I do," Sam says, cradling his hands together.

"You trust her with Mom?"

Sam meets his eyes squarely. "Yeah. I do."

"Okay." Dean nods. "Well, I trust you." That's one thing Dean can do for him that their dad never did.

Sam's stern expression falls a little bit, his eyes going round, and there he is. There's that kid Dean would do anything for.

"Thanks, Dean," Sam says, his eyes falling to his hands again.

Dean reaches over to flip out the lights. "Early morning tomorrow. Get some shut-eye."

The sound of rustling motel sheets layered over the distant roars of trucks on the overpass is comfortingly familiar. With Sam breathing evenly across the room, Dean falls asleep easily.

—

The job is a total milk run, just two vamps who don't have the sense to cover their tracks better. They're in the middle of finishing off a state trooper who made the mistake of investigating a busted Toyota Corolla with blacked-out windows parked on the side of the interstate when Sam and Dean pull up. Once they've collected some heads, they set the whole bloody scene ablaze. All in a day's work.

Dean is restless the whole drive home, changing the music frequently and fiddling with the dash and generally driving Sam nuts, not because he wants to find another case and keep moving like he usually might, but because he's anxious to get home. He makes himself laugh, thinking about Cas greeting him at the door like a normal… whatever he is. _How was work today? Well, I hit a vampire with my car and broke into a police cruiser to steal the dashcam footage. How about you, sweetheart?_

Then he realizes he just mentally called Castiel his 'sweetheart' and has to recalibrate some shit in his head for a bit.

Dean's still fighting a losing battle with the anxious fluttering in his stomach when they step into the library. He frowns, breathing in sharply through his nose when the air makes his eyes sting, and smells smoke. He hears the start of Sam raising his voice in a question just as a high-pitched scream splits the air. Time narrows around Dean; before he can tell his legs to move, he's running.

Images flash through his head: blue eyes glowing so bright they burn out. Black wings seared into the sandy ground. The last embers of a hunter's funeral. A flash of red staggers past him. The air is hazier the closer he gets to the kitchen, where dark smoke is rolling across the ceiling. In the corner is Jack, hands outstretched, Cas standing in place at the gas range, his arms engulfed in flame.

 _"Cas,"_ someone shouts. Dean realizes it's him when Cas looks up, blue eyes red-rimmed and alarmed, flames a foot high eating their way up his arms, licking across his face, a nightmarish mirror of Dean's dream. He can hear yelling around him, but he can't decipher any of it, because all he can focus on is tearing off his jacket to wrap it around Cas, closing the distance with his body, trapping his burning arms between them.

 _"Extinguo,"_ comes another voice, a shrill command, and the heat bearing down on the side of Dean's face is suddenly gone, leaving only smoke and echos of warmth. He doesn't let go of Cas, who is statue-still in his arms.

"Jack, it's okay, let go," someone shouts, _Sam_ , Dean thinks. Then it's raining in the kitchen. Dean looks up slowly, his muscles not quite obeying him. The sprinkler. Right. Water soaks through his flannel and his undershirt, trickling down his nose where it's pressed to Castiel's cheek. Cas pulls back from Dean's vice grip first, hands flat on Dean's chest, his hair matted to his forehead.

"Dean," he says. "I'm sorry."

Dean makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob and kisses him.

When he pulls back, Cas looks stunned. Dean's eyes fall to his open lips, a perfectly round O, and then down to his charred overcoat, and to his hands, splayed against Dean's chest, the skin cracked and blistered. The indoor shower ceases as suddenly as it started, and Dean gathers Cas's hands up carefully, afraid to hurt him more.

"I'm okay," Cas says. The burns fade in the space of a blink. Dean only notices the exposed skin on his throat is hurting when the ache vanishes. "You're okay. I'm sorry, Dean, I didn't— We were just trying to have dinner ready for you when you got back, but the oil in the pan spilled _everywhere_ , and then the water just made it worse—"

"You— you can't put out a grease fire with water," Sam says behind him, and the back of Dean's neck burns. He disentangles himself from Cas, leaving his sodden jacket draped over his shoulders. He glances at the stovetop, where something unrecognizable and charred is gumming up his good sauté pan.

"I'm sorry," Cas says again, despondent. "I don't know why I bothered, I know how to make _nachos_ , but I've never prepared chicken thighs, I should have known I would just… mess it up."

"You idiot," Dean says, struggling to breathe normally.

Cas frowns, his apologetic tone fading. "I was trying to be helpful."

"You're an idiot, you're so stupid," Dean says, and shoves his embarrassment down deep so that he can pull Cas in by the back of his head, kissing him on the forehead fiercely. "I don't care about dinner! I thought something— _happened_ to you!"

Castiel's expression softens, his eyes scanning Dean's face. He reaches up to wipe a droplet of water from Dean's stubbled chin. Dean swallows.

"Can't you, uh, poof us dry, too?" he asks.

"In a moment," Cas says, voice low, eyes focused on Dean's mouth.

Sam clears his throat loudly, and Dean spins on his heel, putting some space between him and Cas. Sam has Rowena wrapped up in a towel, her hair sodden, her makeup tracking down her cheeks in stark black lines. She looks absolutely miserable, and another day Dean might laugh at that, but he's feeling a little too flayed-open to find his sense of humor. Jack is hovering nearby, and Dean pats him on the shoulder once, gruff in his affection.

"You did good," he says. "Stopping the sprinklers like that. Fire coulda spread much further."

Jack's face shifts into a hopeful smile, which he tamps down into something contrite. "I'm sorry about the kitchen."

"I told them to just make reservations somewhere nice," says Rowena icily, "but apparently you boys live in a cultureless vacuum and the best restaurant in fifty miles is a _pizza parlor_."

"Pizza's good," Dean protests. Rowena looks at him with all the bedraggled hatred of a cat that fell in a bathtub. Cas comes up from behind him, and taps her on the forehead. In an instant, she's dry, her face clean and bare. She blinks owlishly.

"Angel Face, you've always been my favorite," she says, flinging off the towel, which collides with Sam's chin.

Mopping up the kitchen takes some work, and nearly every towel in the linen closet. The laundry's gonna be a bitch to get through later. They drag the smoking ruin that was Dean's favorite pan out to the dumpster and pile into the car. Dean vows to put off worrying about the laundry until after dinner, and about how to clean smoke stains off the kitchen ceiling until tomorrow morning. Shoved into a corner booth, eating a slice of sausage and pepperoni with Cas, alive and intact, pressed against him hip to hip, he can almost relax.

"I'd offer to pay for dinner as an apology," Cas says, an untouched slice with Dean's name on it sitting in front of him on the table, "but I'm afraid I don't have any money."

"I think I saw a movie that started that way once," Dean says, quiet and half-hidden by the slice folded in his hand. He grunts when Sam's boot collides with his shin under the table, but next to him, Cas is smiling.

"Which movie?" asks Jack. "Can we watch that one when we—"

 _"No,"_ Sam and Dean bark.

—

The last package arrives at the post office on a Thursday. It's a sword, short and thin and straight. Assembled, all the components look to Dean like the beginnings of a really weird cake-cutting ceremony.

They all gather in the basement, preparing the spell in an empty room which Rowena selects because it's out of the way and easy to clean, the thought of which ramps Dean's anxiety up a few notches, because what's the blast radius on this thing, exactly? She draws a sigil in chalk on the floor and lights white candles that make Dean's eyes water. She also asks Cas to undress, which Dean puts his foot down about.

"I told you, nakedness doesn't bother me like it does you," Cas argues, while Rowena crushes a jarful of dried herbs into a bowl.

"How long does this take? Are we just gonna be staring at Cas's ass for an hour?"

"I didn't think you'd object to that," Rowena says, lilting an eyebrow. Dean swallows an angry retort. "But it is necessary. And if all goes according to plan, his clothes won't fit when it's done, anyway." Dean swears under his breath, storming out and returning with his robe, which he thrusts at Cas.

"At least— Just, you can put this on when— you know."

Cas takes it from him begrudgingly, like he's humoring a child throwing a tantrum, and walks out of the room with it while Rowena continues her work. When he returns, he's barefoot and undressed, positively swimming in Dean's robe, jaw taut.

"Are you happy?"

Dean rolls his eyes then looks back at what Rowena's doing, arms crossed. He's _nervous_ is what he is. What if it doesn't work? What if something goes wrong? What if, at the end of it, _Cas_ isn't happy? They don't usually mess with this kind of magic, and Dean's seen the hundreds of ways spells can go wrong. It itches under his skin. He wants Cas to do what's right for him, but he and Cas aren't always so great at knowing what's right for them, are they?

"I'll need a drop of blood from each of you," Rowena says, twirling the sword a little. Dean's throat constricts, and he looks at Cas in alarm.

"Blood wasn't on the list."

"Just a drop!" Rowena beckons him closer. Dean stays put. Cas grabs his bicep and squeezes.

"I know what she can do with 'just a drop,'" Dean says under his breath.

"This is how it has to be done. Dean, please," Cas says, eyes large. The _'I need you'_ goes unspoken.

Dean looks down at his feet, taking a tense and unsteady breath. "Aren't you scared?"

Cas gives a weak laugh. "Of course I am. But I'd like to do it anyway."

Sam steps up to squeeze Cas's shoulder, offering a little smile. "We've got your back."

"This is going to help Cas?" Jack says, approaching Rowena and her bowl. Rowena smiles, winking in Cas's direction.

"You don't have to participate if you're uncomfortable, Jack," Cas says. Jack looks back, eyes lowering in thought before he meets his eyes again.

"I love you. I want you to be happy. If this can help you, I want to do it."

Dean's chest aches. Next to him, Cas sucks in a sharp breath and goes to Jack, taking his face in his hands before pulling him into a tight hug. Dean watches them a moment, suffocated, before he breathes in deep, coming up behind them, afraid to break the moment, but needing Cas to know what he means. When Cas pulls away from Jack, he looks up at Dean with wet, hopeful eyes. Dean nods. It doesn't feel like enough, but Cas smiles like Dean's given him a gift anyway. Then Sam's there too, a brief hand on the back of Dean and Castiel's necks.

"Okay," Dean says. "Let's do this."

Sam goes first, offering his hand to Rowena, who accepts it with a grin. She holds the point of the sword aloft, bringing it down towards his finger delicately, blood welling on the tip. Then she holds his hand over the bowl, squeezing down, milking it until the blood drips daintily into the well she's made. When Sam walks away, finger in his mouth, Jack steps up, holding his hand straight out as though Rowena might want to shake it. She takes a drop from him as well; into the bowl it goes.

Dean approaches last, hand at his side, eyes boring into her.

"Yes, yes, I understand," Rowena says. "If I hurt your family, la-di-da, stabby stab-stab. Just let me give you a wee little prick, and it's all over."

He frowns. Rowena's eyebrows lift, her eyes dancing with silent laughter. Dean offers his hand.

He doesn't flinch at the sting. One drop and it's over, just as she said. Then Rowena directs them all to sit in a crescent on the floor at key spots on the chalk drawing, and to hold hands. Jack sits between Sam and Dean, and he looks to each of them in turn with an anxious smile. Dean squeezes his hand once, trying to return it.

Rowena sits at the head of the chalk circle. She cracks the eggs into the bowl, one after the other, and drops the shells in after, crushing the whole wet, crunching mess into a paste with a pestle.

"All right, Castiel, now's the time," Rowena says. Castiel slips out of the robe, folding it and setting it on the ground. She directs him to sit in the center of the circle, facing away from Jack, in front of the bowl. "When I recite the incantation, I'll need you to turn the bowl over on your head, just like I told you."

"All that shit's going on his head?" Dean says in mild horror.

"No comments from the peanut gallery," Rowena snipes. "Now. Are you ready, dear?"

He sees Castiel's chest rise and fall slowly once before he nods, face stern, steeling himself. Then, after a pause, Rowena begins to chant.

The candles flicker, as if stirred by a draft. Cas takes the bowl in his hands and upturns it in the air, letting the murky contents ooze out onto the crown of his head. It slides wetly through his hair, over his cheeks, creeping down his neck and over his arms. Cas shuts his eyes, setting the bowl back down on the floor.

Dean's not sure how long it goes on for. It feels agonizingly slow, but Dean can't look away, can hardly blink, watching the concoction swallow Castiel up, bit by bit. It spreads itself over his eyelids, clinging to his chin and slipping down over the length of his throat, down over his sharp shoulders and stretching wet fingers down his arms until the whole naked form of him is completely engulfed. Rowena keeps chanting, and the candles flicker again, burning brighter for one tense second before dimming again, making the room seem darker than it is.

Then, so slowly he almost doesn't notice until it's done, the color of his form changes. The wet mess grows shinier, lighter, until it's matte and shell-like. Cas is utterly still underneath it. Dean stares hard, trying to find evidence that he's even breathing under there. His mouth is closed, and he can't tell if his nose is obstructed by the shell or not.

Rowena's eyes slide open, ringed in electric violet. Her chanting grows urgent. She reaches out, snatching Sam's hand, then Dean's, her grip firm and relentless. Dean keeps his eyes on Cas, willing him to make it through this, to come out the other side in one piece. It's a little like praying, so he does that too, silent but insistent: _You're gonna be all right, Cas. You're gonna be fine. I need you, too. You have to know by now._ _I'll do whatever I have to, just, please, be okay._

Dean startles when the sound of cracking fills the air, and his hand tightens on Jack's. The pale shell encasing Cas begins to split, long fissures snaking over his arms, over his chest. The shell expands, the sounds growing louder and more frequent. Light, green and gold and blue, spills out, dancing on the concrete walls, shining into Dean's eyes and making him squint away. He tries not to close them.

The light grows too bright to see anything underneath, glowing and expanding until it's like the sun is sitting right there in the center of their circle. Pieces of shell begin to fall away in shards, littering the ground around them, little sounds like snowfall in the winter.

Rowena shouts, one last powerful cry, and the shell shatters, falling away. The light bursts, then dies, and the room falls into a darkness so complete Dean wonders if he's been blinded. Then things begin to take shape again, dim, gray forms Dean can almost make out.

Rowena utters a command, and the burnt-out candles relight themselves, bringing the room back into focus. Castiel sits in the center of the circle, eyes closed, bare except for the fragments of eggshell trapped in his hair. Apart from the color in his cheeks, he looks exactly as he did the day he died. Then his eyes flutter open, warm blue in the candlelight, and Dean releases a breath so sharply it almost hurts.

Cas blinks, lifting his hand slowly, like his joints have rusted from disuse. He spreads his fingers in front of him, and Dean can see his eyes widen at the broad span of them. Cas's eyes trail up his thick arms, down over the sparse hair of his chest. He stops there, and Dean looks down to follow him as he lifts his arm to find the Enochian ward tattooed across his ribs.

"Holy shit," Dean whispers. It really is like Rowena just snatched him out of time, just as he was the day Dean lost him. There's a little bit of gray at his temple that Dean hadn't noticed before, remnants of the time he spent as a human. Crows feet gather at the corners of his heavy-lidded eyes. He combs long fingers through his hair, sending bits of shell scattering to the floor, and smiles, and Dean loves him.

"Castiel," Rowena says. "Do you remember where you are?"

"Yes," Cas says, with his voice like gravel, staring in wonder at the backs of his hands. "I'm home."

Cas pushes himself to standing. Dean follows a step behind, grabbing the robe up from the ground and helping Cas into it one arm at a time. When he's decent, he turns around, holding his arms out: _ta da_.

"How do I look?"

"Great," Sam says cheerfully. "It's all good? You feel good?"

"You look happy," Jack says, smiling broadly.

"Yes," Cas says, and it comes out like a laugh. "Thank you." He gathers Jack in for another hug, and then Sam, too, then spins around to grin at Rowena. "Thank you." Rowena does a little curtsy for him. Then Cas's shoulders settle, and he turns to Dean again, chin tucked down, almost shy.

"Hello, Dean," he says. Dean's eyes sting.

"Hey, pal." He pulls Cas in by the shoulder and wraps his arms around him. He's a little bit shorter again, just an inch or so. Dean ducks his chin to speak softly in his ear. "It's great to hear your voice." Cas's arms tighten around his chest, his fingers spanning across Dean's shoulder blades. Dean sighs into it. When he pulls himself away, he brushes a few more shell fragments away from Cas's ear.

"Well, Cas, how do you wanna celebrate?" asks Sam, very wisely focusing on Cas instead of giving Dean a look. Cas looks at his hands again, eyes roaming over them wildly, his cheeks creased with his enduring smile.

"I'd like to take a shower."

—

Cas, an angel with all the power that entails, does not need to shower, but that's apparently no deterrent. While the others clean up after the spell, Castiel goes upstairs to indulge his desire to use up all the hot water, plus Dean's ocean breeze scented body wash. He spends a solid hour in there, and when he knocks on Dean's door his hair is still damp and tousled from the clean bath towel draped over the shoulders of Dean's robe.

"So? How was it?"

"If more angels had taken the time to enjoy a shower, I think they might have understood humanity a little better," Cas says, letting Dean close the door behind him. Now that he's there, though, his smile falters, and he falls quiet.

"You gonna need to borrow some clothes again?"

"I don't want to impose," Cas says. "Maybe I should have gotten new clothes before we started... but I was eager to see it through."

Dean clears his throat, flushing. "Look, uh, I'm not— you're not putting me out. You can borrow my clothes all you want. Mi casa, su casa, y'know?"

Cas looks at him like Dean just promised him the world rather than just a drawer in Dean's dresser. Jesus, Dean's gonna have a heart attack. He doesn't know what to do with something this good. It's been a long time.

"I dunno how many of 'em'll fit you now," Dean admits, stepping closer. He smooths a hand over the sleeve of his robe. "You're, uh, kinda… bigger than I remember."

"Am I?" His head cocks to the side, his mouth still curved in a smile.

Dean huffs, ducking his head. "Uh, yeah, dude. You got stacked at some point, I'm not really sure when." He palms Cas's side next, spanning over the stretch of skin where he's inked. "Never got a good look at this, either."

"I'd like to show you," Cas says, nudging Dean's forehead with his. Their noses brush. Water drips onto Dean's collar. The happiness Dean feels is like a physical force, ballooning inside his chest until it feels like it might burst. He doesn't know how to do this, has no precedent for it, but it hardly seems to matter.

Dean leans down, catching Cas's lips. It's nothing like the first time they kissed. He takes his time, lingering, cataloguing the way Cas molds against him, the way his rough chin scratches at Dean's, the way his voice resonates in his chest when Dean draws a pleased sound from him.

"I'll take you up on that later," Dean says, pulling back. Cas looks up at him, eyes dark but pleased, and tilts his chin up for another brief kiss.

"Later? I feel like I've already wasted so much time."

"It's not a waste," Dean says, but he brings his hands up to cup Castiel's jaw, skimming his thumbs over his bristling cheeks while he kisses him again. "You're here, right?"

"Dean," Cas breathes, and then it's a little more like their first kiss, because Cas's hands (god, his _hands_ ) are gripping his arms and spinning him around, crowding him against the door.

So, yeah, maybe it's gonna take them a few minutes to make it back out of Dean's room.

Cas doesn't fit in Dean's pants, which is— it's very distracting, is what it is, because Dean has to watch him struggle to tug them on over his thighs, and he's really never gonna leave his room again if he doesn't turn his head _now_. Dean has a pair of black track pants, and that's gonna have to do. He fills Dean's borrowed henley out in a way that makes Dean's throat dry. He's half tempted to force the robe on Cas again, because to his eyes, he looks indecent.

"Maybe this time we can get you an actual wardrobe," Dean says, trying not to think about the way his shirt's gonna be stretched out the next time Dean wears it. "Something besides your, y'know, uniform."

"Yes," Cas says, eyes bright and wondering at the possibilities. "I think I'd like something purple."

"Purple?" Dean snorts.

"Yes. Purple. I like purple. And blue, and green."

"We can do that. Shirts in every color. Whatever you want."

"Whatever I want?"

"Yeah, man," Dean says with a shrug. "It's your body. You get to do whatever you want with it."

"I do," Cas says, like it's a revelation. His smile lights up his face. "I can't wait."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I'm gonna get my perfect body back someday  
>  If not by faith, then by the sword  
> [I'm going to be restored.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdKNxZcM5P0)_


End file.
